2 Years: Replacement Time

Almost exactly two years ago, I finally bought myself a basic drone from DJI.

It's a bit odd that I took until 2023 to get one, because I've been a pilot of 'proper' aircraft for over 20 years and the motivation for that was aerial photography for archaeological purposes.

In any case, I opted for the DJI Mini 2SE - now known as the DJI Mini 4K - simply to assess the camera's image quality, which turned out to be very good indeed. 

But it's not just image quality that matters for somebody like me. Compactness of the Mini series is a significant factor when I spend most of my time in the mountains and any additional weight is very unwelcome.

And it's in the mountains my little Mini 2SE proved itself most. It's coped with winds gusting 40mph - way over its stated wind tolerance of 17mph. It's flown to the maximum 500m the software will let you go, which is a necessary element of following mountain terrain where the drone can still be no more than 120m from the nearest point of the earth's surface. And it's coped really well with the odd loss of signal due to an intervening rock or tree. 

But above all, I've really got my money's worth from the Mini 2SE. I've long ago stopped uploading flight logs to DJI, but before I did so, the drone had already clocked up in excess of 1000km. It must have done about 4000km by now. 

There was a small early problem, in that the image from the drone became blurred in some parts. This has been fairly widely reported with DJI drones and stems from the sensor not being fixed properly in its housing. DJI gave me a new drone under warranty very quickly after I sent them some test shots.

And all that distance is time and effort saved in getting to difficult and sometimes almost impossible to reach places where the archaeological stuff I'm capturing for the official historical environment record is so often found. Instead of taking maybe a whole day to get to a site on foot, I can often get there in a minute or two by drone, launched from the side of the road. This benefit just can't be overstated.

When the first drone was in good health: a multi-period stone structure near Porthmadog. It likely began life in the late Iron Age as a defended lookout. In later times, it was adapted into a 'buarth' - a multicellular sheepfold.

 

Last autumn, an occasional instability manifesting as a high-frequency jitter in the camera image, developed. For the most part, I didn't see any real sign of it through the next winter but, by early spring, it had come back to plague most of my footage and was degrading even the still images. It's difficult to pin-down exactly what is causing the instability, which mostly vanishes when the motors are under heavier load in flight. But it could be one of the motors beginning to wear out or the neoprene rubber gimbal cradle could be getting a bit worn. Or it could be a part of the gimbal mechanism itself.

The example below shows the worst example from a couple of months ago; you'll probably have to enlarge the video to see the shaking:

 

But with this many miles on the clock, I'm not complaining at having to replace it at the two year stage. I might even attempt a repair at some stage. I already have the bag, charger and three batteries, so I opted just to buy the drone and controller package. This adds one more battery to the calculation - itself worth £59 - and a spare set of propeller blades - worth £11. Take those two items off the £269 package price and I have a new drone for £199. That's not a bad annual outlay for the pleasure and benefit of a drone.

DJI got the new unit to me in 24 hours. Following the binding procedure published on their website, however, wouldn't work. I had first to uninstall the old DJI Fly software on my phone and download the latest version - something I had actively avoided doing for a very long time, in case it became more restrictive for my mountain flying; the CAA seems intent on a new limit of no more than 120m above launch point, rather than closest land surface, in the not-to-distant future - a real problem for mountain flyers like me, especially when coupled to the proposed remote ID system.

There was a potential problem on uninstalling the old software, because it reported an incomplete uninstall. It turned out fine, though, as the new software installed just fine and operates well. Binding the drone to the handset controller just needed a long-press of the on/off button on the drone until it beeped and flashed its little lights in sequence and following the on-screen prompts. 

The new drone may have a slower accumulation of miles on its clock, as I've captured thousands of structures in the north Wales uplands by now, leaving few left to add to the collection. That said, I have started doing some motorbike and hiking videos, so it will certainly be out on a weekly basis! The new software, by the way, doesn't (yet) seem to be more restrictive than the old version I was using until this week.