so this has been driving me insane for the past couple weeks. im flying my mavic 3 in a spot ive flown probably 50 times before, open field, barely any trees, and it keeps disconnecting. not like a full failsafe RTH situation, more like the video feed cuts for 3-5 seconds and then comes back. but then sometimes it just doesnt come back and i get the full disconnect warning. happened three times last weekend.

nothing has changed in my setup that i can think of. same phone (galaxy s22), same tablet mount, same location. the only thing i can think of is theres a new cell tower that went up maybe half a mile away but idk if that would actually cause this. ive tried switching from auto to manual channel selection in the DJI app and it didnt seem to help. also the signal bars look fine right up until the moment it drops which is the really weird part.

anyone dealt with this before or have ideas where to start

cell towers absolutely can cause this, especially if it went up recently and they're still doing testing/adjustments on it. the 2.4ghz band is just a mess in a lot of areas now. have you tried forcing it to 5.8ghz only? yeah you lose some range but if interference is the issue it usually clears right up. also worth checking if anyone nearby is running wifi on 2.4 -- i had a similar issue and it turned out some farmer had set up a wireless irrigation controller that was blasting interference across the whole field.

the signal bars looking fine before the drop is actually pretty normal weirdly enough, the RSSI display in the app is kind of a lagging indicator, doesnt always catch the actual channel quality in real time.

might be a dumb question but have you tried a different phone? i had weird dropouts with my s21 and switching to an ipad mini completely fixed it. something about how certain android phones handle the usb data connection to the controller i think. also make sure your usb cable isnt the one that came in the box, those things are garbage after like six months of use.