right so this has been a weird one to diagnose. running Walksnail Avatar HD on a 5 inch freestyle build, Foxeer Reaper motor setup, roughly 35 amps peak draw under hard throttle. the video dropout happens kind of randomly but ive noticed it seems worse after the quad has been flying for a bit, like the first 30 seconds are usually clean then it starts getting these little freezes and occasional full blackouts that recover after a second or two.

my first thought was heat - the vtx does get pretty warm, i dont have great airflow over it in the current stack position. but ive also read that Walksnail can have issues with certain ESC/FC combos causing noise on the power lines that messes with the video. im running a 45amp Tekko ESC and a Kakute H7 FC if that matters. cap on the battery lead is a 1000uf 35v which i put on a while back but maybe its not enough.

anyone have experience with Walksnail being picky about power cleanliness or is heat more likely here given the symptoms

honestly it could be both but id lean heat first just because of the timing you described. Walksnail vtx units are kinda notorious for throttling or doing weird things when they get cooked. if you can, stick a small piece of foam or even just reposition the vtx so its getting direct prop wash. some people add a tiny heatsink to the main chip too, theres a few threads about that on rotorbuilds.

that said the power noise thing is real with Walksnail. i had a bad experience with mine where i had the vtx sharing a power rail with a high-draw ESC and it was a nightmare. ended up running the vtx off a dedicated LC filter and it cleaned up significantly. your cap might be fine but an LC filter is like 3 bucks and worth just trying. also double check your vtx antenna connection, loose mmcx connectors on Walksnail specifically cause dropout symptoms that look exactly like what youre describing and its easy to miss

the Tekko ESCs in my experience put out a fair bit of noise, im not saying theyre bad but theyre not the cleanest. i switched to a different ESC partly for that reason and my video got noticeably better. might not be worth swapping just for that but worth knowing