okay so this has been bugging me since tuesday. doing a commercial flat roof inspection for an insurance company, big warehouse maybe 400ft x 200ft, and i had the mini 3 pro out which i know isnt ideal for this kind of work but its what i had available that day

thing is i got about 3/4 through the flight plan and the signal just dropped. not a full disconnect but it went to like 1 bar and the video feed got choppy and it started drifting. i was standing on the ground at the edge of the building and there were maybe 8-10 large HVAC units on the roof between me and the drone. got it back manually but it was sketchy for a second

my gut says the HVAC units were blocking line of sight to the RC and maybe also putting out some interference. has anyone else ran into this? thinking i need to either fly from the roof itself next time or use something with better signal penetration. or just do the flight plan in sections and reposition. the mini 3 is fine for residential roofs but this felt like it was at the edge of what it can handle

yeah the HVAC thing is real, those big commercial units can mess with your signal especially if youre using 2.4ghz and the units have VFD drives ? they put out a ton of interference. repositioning yourself is the move, i usually walk the perimeter of big roofs and break the mission into quadrants so i always have reasonable LOS. standing in one spot and expecting the signal to punch through all that metal equipment is asking for trouble

also for insurance inspections specifically you probably want to step up to an enterprise platform anyway, the data quality requirements some of these companies have are getting pretty specific. ive had adjusters come back asking for overlap percentages and GSD specs that a mini 3 technically can do but its a pain to document

i dont think it was neccesarily the HVAC interference, more likely just pure physical obstruction breaking your video link. ocusync and o3 both rely on a relatively clear path. i had almost the exact same thing happen on an industrial facility with a bunch of exhaust stacks and the fix was just positioning myself higher ? standing on a truck bed or a ladder at the roof edge makes a huge difference. sounds dumb but it works