ok so bear with me because ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks. i fly in a pretty RF-dense area, lots of industrial stuff nearby, couple cell towers within a km or so, and ive noticed my avata 2 on O4 handles it noticeably better than my old fpv drone on O3 did in the same spots. like the O3 would give me those occasional freezes in the goggles and the signal strength indicator would dip, but O4 just seems cleaner.

but i cant tell if thats actually the protocol being better or if its just the newer hardware doing frequency hopping more aggressively or something else entirely. i dont have a way to do a proper controlled test and honestly most of the youtube comparisons i found were done in the middle of nowhere where theres no real interference to speak of so they're useless to me.

does anyone actually understand how the channel selection and interference rejection changed between the two or am i just imagining a difference because i want to justify the upgrade cost lol

youre not imagining it. O4 genuinely does handle dense RF environments better, the frequency hopping algorithm is faster and it has a wider usable bandwidth to hop across. O3 was already pretty good but it was designed more for range optimization than interference tolerance if that makes sense. there was some actual technical breakdown of it on RCGroups a while ago, someone dug into the baseband specs. the short version is O4 recovers from interference events faster even if it still encounters them at roughly the same rate.

that said the difference is probably more noticeable in your use case than it would be for someone flying at a park on weekends. industrial RF environments are a different beast, youve got all kinds of weird harmonics and broadband noise that consumer video links werent really designed around. im actually a bit surprised O4 holds up as well as it does for you tbh

this is interesting because ive had the opposite kinda experience where my O3 air unit on a custom build has been rock solid in the city and i keep seeing people claim O4 is this massive leap. maybe it depends a lot on the specific frequencies of whatever interference youre dealing with. or the antenna setup. my stuff is running helicals so that probably changes things anyway