Background info:

I've got a few different quads I am flying while also working on a LR build of the GEPRC Baby Croc.  I use the DJI system, including the Tx.  Everything is stock, except that I have the 1200mW active.

The story:


A couple days ago I went out to a local "park" where my wife and I take our dogs for walks.  It has a super long trail (actually goes from Mexico to San Francisco) in the park and I decided to do some flying while she took the dogs further up the trail.  After flying my DC3 for a couple packs I decided to fly my Mr. Croc up the trail and see if I could find her and the dogs. The Mr. Croc has GPS and I thought it might make for a decent range check as my intent has been to stick with my DJI system for my Baby Croc and eventually go with Crossfire if I really get into it deeply.

I figured she was no further than a mile away in the time period while I was flying the DC3, so it should have been pretty easy to find her.  But as you can see in the short video below I apparently got too far out and lost my video feed.  Since I was flying on the deck I just hit the disarm switch and ditched on the trail.  (Thankfully a phone call later and the wife was able to pick it up on her way back.  Yay for cell phones!)    I probably could have not touched anything and it would have failsafe'd with RTH.  But I panicked just a little and it worked out ok.  Only damage was the battery pack got ejected.

Anyway, I figured I would be able to tell from the onboard video how far away I was but the video doesn't have the OSD in it.  I've seen plenty of DJI footage on YT to know it's possible to show the OSD but I'm not really sure how.  

So two questions:

1. How do I activate the OSD so I can watch the video and see how far it says I was?

2.  I'm guessing I was out about a half mile, maybe a bit more.  If I can't get the OSD to show I'm hoping some of you LR enthusiasts could watch the video and tell me what your best guestimate is.

I also suspect I myself limited my range to some degree by both sitting down while I was flying and flying low to the ground.  Is that an accurate assumption?  

Tonight I just installed the Iflight Crystal antennas (2 patch and two stubbies) and I plan to go back out there and see what the range difference is.  But unless it is a HUGE improvement I just don't see the DJI system as being viable for LR.  I'd really appreciate any thoughts on this, especially anyone else using the DJI system and pushing the range limit.

The video:

https://1drv.ms/v/s!AlqezZ7lgQsRrnr2fvBj...7?e=QEMNst

Thanks in advance!

To answer the question of how far, there are enough landmarks from the video that you can certainly see in Google Earth and you can use the measure tool to get that distance. You don't even need the whole app installed, just use Earth.google.com and the measure tool is on the bottom of the icons on the left.

You can put the DJI OSD as a text overlay on your video, but you can't put the newer betaflight OSD elements on the video unless you saved them in your radio. DJI does not save the betaflight OSD info anywhere so there is no way to use that in you video unfortunately.

Unfortunately you can't record the OSD on DJI. You can playback the normal DJI info (channel, signal strength, latency, bitrate) using a subtitle file, but it won't include any of the BF OSD elements like GPS.

The way around this is to set your radio up to record telemetry and then sync this to your video as an overlay using something like DashWare. Here is a tutorial on setting up logging on OpenTX and creating the overlay:


You don't need to go this far to get GPS data, just make sure you have telemetry setup properly and have OpenTX record the GPS coordinates during your flight. You can then download this to Google Earth and visualize the flight path at a later date.

Thanks guys. Unfortunately since I am using the DJI Tx I can't have my radio record the telemetry. But I will try the Google Earth idea. I hadn't thought about that.

I fly that low for short distances like that often enough without worrying about video loss like that. It's strange you lost video that close in an area that looks like there shouldn't be a high noise floor. But I've come across places that have a lot more than I'd ever have expected, a spectrum analyser can come in handy sometimes.

Ive only used Vista but I've read complaints about the antennas having a weak connection on the dji air units or something to that effect. There's also quite a few diy videos on YT for soldering a pigtail ditectly to them assumably there's a reason for this. Not something I'm suggesting you should do but pointing out an area that might be worth investigating.

I was looking for a good way to show telemetry from Ardupilot and Betaflight on video.
I tried different programs for creating overlays.
Finally I found it very time consuming and wrote a program to create telemetry subtitles.
The program is free and open source. Can run on Windows/Mac/Linux or just in browser.

Steps to create telemetry subtitles:
1. Copy telemetry log from radio to computer.
2. Open program in in Jupyter notebook (you can run in JupyterLab online https://jupyter.org/try, or from you computer)
set:

• log file name
  
• output file name
  
• offset in log files (set 0 if you dont know)
  

run appopriate cell for Betaflight or Ardupilot, depending of what you have
3. Open the video in your favorite player and enjoy!


Demo:

Program:
https://github.com/andrey-svetlichny/telemetry-srt

if you con't have Jupyter notebook installed, you can run JupyterLab online https://jupyter.org/try
or install it from Anaconda Installers https://www.anaconda.com/products/individual

(11-May-2021, 03:37 PM)Andrey Wrote: I was looking for a good way to show telemetry from Ardupilot and Betaflight on video.
I tried different programs for creating overlays.
Finally I found it very time consuming and wrote a program to create telemetry subtitles.
The program is free and open source. Can run on Windows/Mac/Linux or just in browser.

This is a great piece of work. Thanks for sharing and making it available to the community for free.

It really deserves to be in it's own topic with it's own title. Do you have any objections if I split this post out into a new separate topic under the HDV FPV System subforum?

There are also Dashware plugins for adding telemetry overlays to videos. I think this is the original thread, but there are a ton of tutorials and examples on YouTube as well.
https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthre...g-DASHWARE