Thanks for the reply.
With other drones I have, the RTH options normally include a setting that will, upon RTH triggering, force the drone to attain a specified altitude before beginning the trip back towards home base. This is beneficial in my circumstance, because I live on heavily wooded acreage. Matter of fact, when I launch, I have to take the drone straight up to clear trees all around the small clearing I have near the garage, then once clear of the tree tops, I can head out horizontally. If I were to bring the drone down near my stream or some other small clearing at distance, and the connection gets lost, the drone would then raise to the designated safe height before heading back horizontally to me.
So how does the Skydio handle something like this? If I were to fly the Skydio the same way as mentioned above, even if I did not lower the Sydio once out horizontally, maintaining, say 200 ft height, and it got 1000 ft horizontally away from me, if RTH is triggered because I ran out of signal strength, what does it do? Does it make a beeline back to me using a diagonal path? Which in my case would be through a pretty heavy layer of tree tops. Or does it maintain the vertical height and then once nearly above, then descend to land?
My worry is that if the Sydio is out at the limits of travel and I do lose connection (which has happened often enough on my Xioami Mi 4K and my Parrot Anafi) RTH has always brought them back home without issues. So I can pretty much bet that when I do get my Skydio, when I try flying it in the same manner using the controller, I'm pretty sure I will lose connection simply flying out to the edges of my own property. If it tries to fly directly back to me during RTH diagonally through the trees, I'm guessing I am going to wind up with this Skydio stuck between trees somewhere waiting for me to come find it. Even if it doesn't crash against small branches which are notoriously at the tops of pine trees.
Oh yeah, I did mention that I have a stream, which is on the north end of the property. The people at Skydio tell me that during RTH, if the drone gets stuck using AO trying to return, it will simply hover in place until the pilot recovers it and it picks up the signal again, or the drone runs out of juice and then goes into an emergency landing. This would be rather awkward if the Skydio is hovering over my stream and I am playing beat the clock to try to find it before it commits suicide. Heck, even coming down for an uncontrolled landing anywhere on my property would very likely put the Skydio into the top of some pine tree and out of reach until the next big storm blows it loose.
So, hence my concern. Yes, I know, my property isn't really very favorable for drone flying. But the advertised smarts of this drone is what got me excited about the Skydio. Hoping that the obstacle avoidance would lessen the "white knuckle" experience every time I fly. This is something I am trying to find out beforehand about without having to do it experimentally and learn that wasn't a very wise method of finding the answer.
Oh did I mention I don't have my Skydio yet? I'm in batch #3, so I am SUPPOSED to be getting it by the end of this month. Theoretically. So if I find that I cannot fly this thing on my property without having a very good chance of losing it, I may have to pass, even after waiting all this time to get it.
The video seems to be quite nice from both of them.
