I lost my tri-copter need advice on GPS return to home

Cyberdactyl

Misfit Multirotor Monkey
Also, there's a understated obvious way that many may not realize to find your multirotor by simply using your FC's disarming beep.

I have hundreds of acres of dense woods against the back of my property and have crashed into the woods four times now. Luckily twice I just walked around, stood still and disarmed with the transmitter and listened. After about 4 or 5 tries I could hear the distant beep.

For example, last summer I was really pushing the distance I fly and completely lost video, the dreaded white snow. I avoid flying over my neighbor's property and was flying the yellow track (see the pic below) and after about 5 seconds, I decided to lower the throttle, since I saw roughly where I was last. I went to where I thought it was, green dot, found it at the red dot by walking around in the general area, stood as quiet as possible and disarmed (pushed the left stick to the bottom left). I had to cross a stream up to my waist, but was happy. Another time it was only around 100 feet in the woods and almost didn't need the beeping.

Granted, this will not work if you have no clue outside of a ~500 foot radius or an area too large to check or too difficult to access and/or the FC or power system is damaged. But most of those caveats are also applicable to a locator device. Both times I was lucky in that regard. The times I wasn't, it was at night and late dusk and did a quick token search and took the risk of searching the next day to no luck when I then didn't have the option of the beep method.

 

jhitesma

Some guy in the desert
Mentor
Good point, on my FPV250 with Naze32 and a beeper I configured it so when any of my aux channels go low the beeper goes off - so if I turn off the TX it starts to beep. I also have one of my switches set so I can force a channel low to set off the beeper. But it's not a super loud beeper and not audible from very far.

I also have my ESC's on all my quads set to beacon, both blHeli and simonk support it (though it's a bit trickier to enable on SimonK) and with that set if the ESC's don't receive signal for a given period they'll start beeping the motors. But again, it's not super loud.

I have parts to build a small low power FM tracker module to put on my quads but it's been low on the priority list. I used to use something similar on my rockets - just a cheap Ramsey electronics 144mhz "spy transmitter" kit with a PIC and a small piezo programmed to beep out my callsign in morse over and over. I really need to get that project back to the top of the stack soon....