okay so this might be a dumb question but im genuinely confused about the current state of DJI's transmission systems. i used to fly a Phantom 4 Pro with Lightbridge and that thing was rock solid even near high voltage lines and substations, i could get relatively close without the feed going garbage. recently picked up an Air 3 running O3+ and im noticing its a bit more twitchy near electrical infrastructure, like the latency spikes and i get occasional pixelation that i never really saw before.

is this actually a known difference between the systems or am i just imagining it because im paying more attention now? i've read conflicting stuff online, some people say O3 is strictly better and the old Lightbridge comparisons are irrelevant, others say Lightbridge was more interference resistant in certain environments. genuinely cant tell whats marketing and whats real.

for context im doing some industrial inspection adjacent work, not certified or anything just personal projects, but i do end up flying near a lot of equipment that probably radiates. would appreciate anyone who has actually tested both in similar conditions and not just parroting spec sheets.

honestly i think its a real difference and not just placebo. Lightbridge was designed from the ground up for robustness over range, the encoding and modulation it used was pretty conservative by modern standards but that conservatism made it resilient. O3 and O3+ are chasing low latency and high bitrate which means they're making different tradeoffs. near powerlines you're dealing with broadband EM noise and honestly both systems struggle but they fail differently, Lightbridge would degrade gracefully, O3 tends to be more binary in my experience, fine then suddenly not fine.

that said i dont think the answer is go back to Lightbridge gear, its a dead end platform. if youre serious about flying near infrastructure you might want to look at what RC controllers support and whether there's any way to do a site survey before you fly to pick the cleanest channel available.

slight tangent but this is part of why some people doing actual inspection work end up going with Herelink or custom setups on ArduPilot stuff, way more control over the radio link and you can actually tune it for your environment. not saying go build a custom drone obviously but the reason DJI's systems feel like a black box is because they kind of are, you get what you get and when interference hits you have limited options beyond channel switching. for powerline work specifically ive heard people swear by keeping altitude up and maintaining line of sight aggressively rather than trying to get close and low where the field density is worst.