I purchased my first drone on my birthday. I had it about a week until I got too cocky and tried to fly it in too much wind and also not knowing how to switch it into high range to better fight the wind. The drone caught some wind and was carried out of range of the transmitter and well long story short the drone is probably in a tree within 150 yards from the house. I searched off and on looking high and low for the better part of a week and no dice. Drone number 2 came in the mail about a week later. I promised myself to keep it close and in range and also switched up into high mode when fighting some wind. I few about 150ft high one day directly over head of the house and noticed some signal drop off but was able to recover and land without incident. I noticed a modification for extra range by using an old modem antenna. I had 2 transmitters so I though I would do the modification on one and try it out. The modification was a success, or so I thought. Friday July 15th I took the drone out for its maiden flight post modification and I did get some increase range. I probably got up to 200ft and no signal loss. I started to cruise back down to ground level and thought I shouldn't have any issues as I didn't think I needed to be going that high. I flew past the house and up over the neighbors house and got up about a 90 feet or so and all of a sudden the signal dropped out and the drone kind of tumbled and glided into the neighbors tree. About 45 feet up in the tree. I was mad at myself and upset that I have now lost 2 drones. Even though I knew where the drone was this time, I figured the drone was lost for in just a few days we were going to be getting rain and that would be the end of the drone. We wen to the local hardware store and I bought some lengths of 3/4" pvc pipe and I rigged up a pole that would reach close to 50ft. The bad thing was that the pvc was too flexible and would bend before it got anywhere close to where we needed it to be. We did however attract the attention of both neighbors and the mailman while partaking in our hopeless endeavor. Needles and I walked away dejected and thought that's it, we tried. I went ahead and ordered my third exact drone and it is to come Tuesday. Here is was Sunday evening and I noticed the Ameren Illinois truck pull up to the corner. I thought for a brief moment...Maybe I should ask if they could retrieve my drone. Was it too much to ask and pretty silly request and just about the time I was going to go outside. The truck pulled away and that was the end of it until about 10 minutes later the truck came back and pull under that same tree. I thought now or never so I went outside and I overheard my neighbor mention the drone to the Ameren guy but he didn't know where it was. It turns out about an hour before they started having power troubles with lines touching from that same tree. We had a brief wind storm about a week ago with lines galloping and sparking and I think some power lines got push up on top of the limbs. We had a chance of storms today but all we got was a little bit more wind that I guess made the lines touch and cause the outage, hence the Ameren truck. The gentleman after trimming the tree limbs to let the power lines separate asked me where the drone was. I told him where it was and within 15 minutes he had it and delivered it into my hand. I could not believe my luck. I am still just dumbfounded as we are supposed to get storms over the nest 2 days which would have rendered the drone toast. I did also recover the footage from the drones fateful flight. I may render it and upload it to YouTube and share the link here soon. Of course I will cut the additional 25 minutes of tree footage. I still can not believe it. I hope you had a good weekend.
