Yesterday I didn't crash much, but after one power loop crash of my AOS35, my long vtx antenna had pulled out of the mount enough to pull the wires out enough that I couldn't just push it back in. 

First thing very early this morning, I started taking it apart to push the antenna back into the mount, when I saw that one of the diversity rx antennas had disconnected from the rx board. I had another rx with antenna, so I thought I'd use that antenna. Then I noticed that the gnd wire had disconnected from the rx, so I soldered it back on. After that, when I went to connect the antenna, I saw that the ring on the ipex connector had come off the board, and was stuck in the antenna connector (this has happened to me before).

After looking at it a bit, I decided that I couldn't repair the connector, so decided to just use the other rx, which is a Beta FPV 2.4 GHz ELRS rx with a single dipole antenna. Soldered it up, got it installed, and updated the ELRS firmware to 3.3.0. A bench test showed that I had rx/tx connection and vtx/goggles connection.

Headed over to the local HS field a little before sunrise, hoping to catch the sun as it came over the mountain, with the AOS, as that has a camera that's in better condition than my Volador30, which inherited the camera from my Cinebot30 which I'd crashed hard so many times that the camera lens is quite scratched up. 

Got set up just before the sun came up, took off, and noticed it was flying funny. Oh yeah, it was in angle mode. So I pushed the angle mode switch down, and while at it, thought I'd push all the other switches down, since that's part of my preflight. Oops--I was already in the air, so pushing the arm switch down was a bad idea. The quad plummeted to the ground from about 20-30 feet, and landed upside down.

Turtle mode righted it, took off again, and it went crazy and crashed again. Uh oh--prop or motor problem probably. Nope, broken arm. Crap! All that work to get it ready for sunrise, and I missed it.

Oh well, I'll fly the Volador30 instead. Unfortunately, by the time I got it up in the air the sun was up, so instead of getting video of the sunrise, there was just a big ball of bright light blinding the camera.

Still had a blast flying the Volador--flew five packs, and worked a bunch on inverted flight; seeing what kind of hang time I could get, practiced power loops, determined that I could make it to our house without losing signal, flew around all the soccer goals and geese littering the field, and just generally had a blast. Y'all know what I'm talking about.

Shortly after I got home, I started replacing the arm, but in the process noticed that a couple of the motor wires had separated from the motor. Damn! Instead of a just a $4 arm replacement, I also had to do a $20 motor replacement. All because of a stupid little mistake that started because I was in angle mode. This wasn't the first time angle mode had caused me trouble. I had removed it as a mode because of previous problems with it, but on the advice of some folks here, put it back. I have never once found angle mode useful, but it has caused me trouble more than once. I'm thinking again of eliminating it as a mode.

One thing I thought about is what I can do differently so that if an arm breaks it doesn't take the motor with it. This time I used a motor wire shield, which protects the wires near the motor, but allows them to move through the shield if stressed, and I cut the wires so there is LOTS of slack in them, looping the extra into the body. So far, I have not taped them to the arm, as I think that was part of the problem. Even though there was decent slack in the wires, the tape held the wires to the part of the arm still connected to the bottom plate, putting too much stress on the wires when the end of the arm broke and pulled the motor with it.

Previously I had not taped the wires to the arm, and a couple of motor wires got cut when I hit some bushes, so after that I used tape to protect the wires. But, I'd rather solder some wires together than replace a $20 motor. Maybe I'll add a tie wrap, and not make it too tight, but for now I'm just going to leave them as is and see how it goes.

Looks like those arms only make use of 3 motor mount holes. …you could take some high strength fishing line, tie it to the 4th motor mount hole, run it alongside or under your motor wires, and then tie it off to a standoff to make it so your motor can’t be pulled farther than the wiring allows.

I don’t know that I’d actually try that, it could go horribly wrong and turn your motor into a wrecking ball in a bad crash- or rip your standoff out.