okay so i moved about 8 months ago and my new place is maybe 4 miles from a regional airport. obviously i follow all the laanc stuff and fly in the areas where i have authorization but ever since i moved i've noticed my fpv gear just behaves differently out here. running a walksnail avatar hd system on a 5 inch freestyle build and the video feed gets these weird momentary glitches that i never had at my old spot.

its not a dealbreaker, like the video doesnt full drop, more like a half second of static every now and then. but it wasnt happening before and the only real variable is the location. im wondering if ground radar or whatever other RF stuff airports run is stepping on 5.8. i swapped to a different video transmitter thinking it was hardware but same behavior. googled around and got mixed answers, some people say airport radar is way out of band, others say the overall RF environment near airports is just noisier in general from all the avionics comms and ATIS and everything.

has anyone actually measured this or has experience flying fpv near a regional airport? curious if dropping to 2.4 for the video link would even help or if im chasing something that isnt really there

airport radar operates way below 5.8 so thats probably not it directly, but you're right that the overall spectrum around airports is pretty congested. theres a ton of L-band and C-band stuff, VHF comms, ILS, all sorts. whether any of that bleeds into your 5.8 band depends on your VTX's front-end filtering. cheaper vtx units have pretty bad rejection of out of band signals and they can desense even if the interfering signal isnt technically on your frequency.

walksnail is generally pretty solid on filtering but if you havent already id try changing your channel selection manually rather than leaving it on auto. sometimes auto picks a channel thats cleaner on paper but has more real world issues. also what antennas are you running, linear vs circular polarization makes a big difference for rejecting multipath which can look similar to interference glitches

honestly i'd just get a spectrum analyzer app and see whats actually there before assuming. there are rtl-sdr based options that are cheap enough, gives you actual data instead of guessing. might find the problem has nothing to do with the airport at all and its just a neighbor with a dodgy 5.8 device or something