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Flights above 400 feet

i have a request to take a photograph of 300+ acres and 400 ft will not get it in the shot.... Anyone with experience above 400 ft please give input and tips..... It's in a rural area, very little to no air traffic bellow 5000 ft most well above.....

Unless you have set a 400 foot restriction in the app your Inspire 1 is going to operate at 400, 500 or 600+ feet AGL no differently then it does at 40 feet and unless you are extremely unlucky and encounter a light airplane or a helicopter flying VFR at 400 AGL over the same field you are flying over no one is going to be the wiser.

If you are not surrounded by trees, I would say the odds of you not seeing a larger aircraft in the vicinity of your Inspire before separation became a problem are extremely low.

Not advising you to break the rules or do anything you are uncomfortable with but IF you decided to, I see this as a very low risk operation for both man & machine......
 
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I stay in the shetlands and regularly fly at 500 mtrs it's locked at 120 metres around airports I did a wee job for a boy next to an airport andcouldnt go any higher,had permission to fly from the control tower just phoned and gave my mobile incase an emergency flight came in, line of sight heard about it usually fly at 2000-3000 mtrs out,but I live on the island of bressay, not so reckless on the mainland
 
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I think at some point the FAA will require DJI and others to limit drones sold in the US to 400', if that is done it will be included in an update.

There are too many people going to 1000' AGL for "fun" that have no earthly idea what they are doing. Those people will require the government to limit the height on the drone itself

You can use google earth for showing larger areas
 
Isn't the I1 locked to 400ft max when in the USA now?

Mine isn't

I think at some point the FAA will require DJI and others to limit drones sold in the US to 400', if that is done it will be included in an update.

There are too many people going to 1000' AGL for "fun" that have no earthly idea what they are doing. Those people will require the government to limit the height on the drone itself

You can use google earth for showing larger areas

Yes, thank you noobs
 
I would like to fly at a place called Pilots Peak in WY. I want to closely follow the mountain side up to the summit. Pilots peak is very steep, the summit is only a mile from the road, but the summit is also 4500ft above the road. I was wondering, if the pilot app has topography, will it figure out that the inspire is only 50 feet above the ground, even if the inspire is thousands of feet higher than where it took off from. Also is it possible to work around the elevation limits, by resetting the home point to the current location, and then climbing again. Yesterday while flying on Loaf Mountain here in Wyoming, I reached the 1600ft limit, even though I was less than 100ft above the ground, however I had no networking or previously downloaded topography for that flight.

If the pilots app doesn't know the true above ground elevation of the quad copter; yet has the topography and the GPS position, that would be a rather straight forward mathematical challenge for the DJI coding staff to incorporate into future updates of the Pilot App software.
 
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I would like to fly at a place called Pilots Peak in WY. I want to closely follow the mountain side up to the summit. Pilots peak is very steep, the summit is only a mile from the road, but the summit is also 4500ft above the road. I was wondering, if the pilot app has topography, will it figure out that I am only 50 feet above the ground, even when I am thousands of feet higher when I took off. Also is it possible to work around the elevation limits, by resetting the home point to the current location, and then climbing again. Yesterday while flying on Loaf Mountain here in Wyoming, I reached the 1600ft limit, even though I was less than 100ft above the ground, however I had no networking or previously downloaded topography for that flight.

400ft agl...not sure if the app knows, but I've flown from 4800ft and went to 400ft (5200ft) app only showed 400ft, I didn't cache the map though so I can't say if it would recognize the increase in altitude
 
The map sources used by the pilot app do not provide topography, it isn't a feature at this point. Everything is strictly with regard to takeoff altitude.
 
If height is that important then, go get the local pilot and airplane, it should not cost more then a $200. Second depending on the angle you have to get go to 400ft, and stitch the images together. Basically get into position, rotate the craft about 30 degrees ccw, tilt down and take a shot, tilt up keeping some over lap, shoot another, tilt up to the horizon with overlap and do it again.

now rotate the copter to starting position keeping over lap from the first set of pictures, tilt down and repeat the shooting process of over lap, then rotate the craft another 30 degrees, now cc from the starting point. and repeat the vertical images. when done

Now you need to stitch the images, you can do it in photoshop or another option is to download Microsoft ICE, dump all the images in there, and if you did it right you should have a good result.

good luck, 300 acres+ get a high res camera, and shoot it from an airplane, you will have a much better result, especially with having having a better image quality then you would get from the I1
 
LOL I am a licensed private pilot for 10 years, own two Storm racing drones, a Phantom 1 and a Phantom 3 and am trying to decide if I want to wait for an I2 or get the I1..,,,,didn't know I was a noob,,


Pilot here too, get the I1, it is awesome. I bought it on the 25th of July and have over 115K miles on it.
 
There's a place I want to shoot that climbs 1200 feet on a 3 mile dirt road with switch backs. If I try to fly this route from the bottom I'll probably never be more than a few hundred feet above the ground, but to complete the route would involve 1200 feet of elevation gain.

OK, the first question is will the current firmware in the USA permit me to make this as a single flight or will I need to break it up into 3 or more separate flights to avoid exceeding 400 in any one flight? That is, will the drone allow this or not?

Second question is, if the drone permits me to do this am I legal to do it? Again, I don't think there's anyplace where I'd be over 400 feet above the ground at any moment in time but over the 3 miles and dozen switch backs the total gain would be 1200 feet.

Going the other way, going down from the top that is, what limitations if any are there in descending BELOW the take off location? Can I descend 400 feet? More?


Brian
 

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