so ive been running fatshark dominator hd3s for like 3 years now and finally bit the bullet and picked up a walksnail avatar HD goggles kit last month. been flying it on my 5inch freestyle build mostly and a little bit of proximity stuff in the woods near my place.

the latency is genuinely impressive and the image quality blows the analog stuff out of the water obviously, but theres this weird thing where when i fly in heavier tree cover the image just... freezes for a split second before it recovers. doesnt crash out completely but its enough to mess with my head when im threading gaps. my buddy says its normal for digital and just how the compression handles packet loss but idk it still bugs me.

also came with the stock antennas which i swapped out pretty quick for a pair of lollipop omnis on the goggles and a single pagoda on the VTX side. not sure if thats even the right call for the walksnail system vs what i was used to doing with my rapidfire and true-D setups. anyone running aftermarket antennas on their avatar stuff and actually noticing a difference or am i just turning wrenches for no reason at all

the freeze thing is just digital being digital, your buddy is right. walksnail handles interference differently than DJI does - it tends to hold the last clean frame rather than going to static, which honestly feels worse to me psychologically even though its technically safer. been flying avatar for about 8 months and the woods freeze happens to everyone, you kind of get used to reading it.

on the antenna question though - yeah the stock antennas are pretty mediocre. lollipops are fine for omni coverage but if youre doing any kind of distance or even just flying at a park where theres a lot of 5.8 noise, throwing a patch or helical on one of the goggle ports makes a noticeable difference. i run a lumenier axii patch in the bottom port and an omni up top and the range and penetration both improved. for the VTX side i kept a pagoda and havent felt the need to change it.

wait do the walksnail goggles actually have two antenna ports you can run different types on at the same time? i thought it was just diversity between two of the same. genuinely asking cause im looking at the avatar system and trying to figure out if the antenna game is similar to what i know from analog