D4R II range problems, acting all of a sudden

Today, I have had some spare time and I have decided to go and fly few battery packs on my favorite spot.
Everything seemed OK while I was flying the first pack and when I started the second after a minute or so my Taranis started blabbering telemetry lost/recovered. I have landed and checked all connections, antennas the D4R II receiver and so on but everything seemed to be in order.

Well, that was odd, but I have decided to continue flying since I have wasted only one pack. I have continued flying and ignored the warnings up till a moment when I have lost signal completely and the Naze failsafe kicked in and my miniquad started falling as a rock.

Enjoying the sunset over Skopje, the moment when my D2R II receiver started acting.

Screenshot taken just before the failsafe on my Naze kicked in

Up side down. D4R II acting strange.

Aaaand one second after that. It would have looked more scary to me if this was the first time that my quad is up side down 🙂

Luckily enough I was flying relatively high at the moment and the link got restored, so I have had more than enough time to stand up and see my miniquad falling and then again look at my monitor (no goggles here), flip it over and continue flying.
I flew the rest of the packs in closer range noticing that something is definitely wrong, either with my transmitter or the receiver on my miniquad.

When I have got back home, I have tested the range just to see that the RSSI signal was dropping to zero when I entered another room with a concrete wall between the transmitter and receiver.

I needed to check if my Taranis is OK first, so I have turned on my bigger quad with X8R on it and walked with the transmitter between the rooms without any issues, the RSSI signal was between 60 and 90. So the Taranis was  functioning perfectly.

I have removed the D4R receiver from my miniquad and powered it with a spare ESC so I could test if maybe there is some interference that is causing the problem. Still the RSSI signal dropped to zero when moving in the other room.

Next thing that I have got on my mind was replacing the antennas on the D4R with new ones, that didn’t help either.

I had no other ideas so I have tried googling the problem. No luck there too.

Replace D4R II with X8R

X8R replacement receiver

At the end, I was ready to give up and replace the receiver with my spare X8R, so I have bound  it in place of the D4R and I have created new model for the D4R just in case I needed it sometime in future and once again, for the last time I have tested the range, just to discover that the range problem was gone and my D4R receiver displayed RSSI values similar to the ones of the X8R.

So it seems that there was some kind of linking problem between the Taranis and D4R II and when I relinked them in order to use it with the new model, the problem was gone.

After this, I have once again linked the D4R with the ZMR250 model in the Taranis and everything worked without any issues.

My two cents, if you experience similar problems, try rebinding the receiver with the transmitter, it may save you some time and possibly $$ for a new receiver.

0 replies

Leave a Reply

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply