ok so i fly a lot in urban areas, mostly weekend mornings when its quieter but there are still tons of wifi networks everywhere. ive been thinking about this more lately because i had a pretty sketchy moment last month where my fpv quad started glitching out bad when i was flying near an apartment complex, like the video feed just turned to static and i had failsafe kick in. luckily it landed fine but it got me thinking i dont actually understand the interference picture as well as i thought i did.

im running crossfire for control link so that part im not too worried about, its the video side thats the issue, running a 5.8ghz vtx. from what i understand 5.8 has more channels to spread out on and theoretically less congestion from regular wifi but in practice it seems like i get more interference not less. maybe because 5.8ghz wifi is everywhere now with all the newer routers. do people just band-hop until they find something clean or is there a smarter way to go about this. i have a spectrum analyzer app on my phone but honestly im not great at reading it

yeah 5.8 used to be the cleaner band but that ship has sailed pretty much anywhere near housing. whats actually more important than the band choice is picking channels that dont overlap with the most common wifi channels. most home routers default to channels 36, 40, 44, 48 on 5ghz so avoiding those and going higher in the band like ch8 on 5.8 fpv (5917mhz range) tends to help. the spectrum analyzer is the right tool you just gotta look for the gaps between the tall spikes and park your vtx there. takes like 2 minutes once you get used to reading it.

honestly for urban flying ive just kind of accepted that 5.8 video is always going to be a bit sketchy and started treating it as the weak link in the chain. crossfire handling control is the important part, video cuts are annoying but recoverable. if it keeps bothering you DJI O3 or avatar HD are way more resilient to this kind of interference but thats a whole different rabbit hole cost wise. the spectrum app thing is good though, spend some time with it before you arm next time and it'll start making more sense