so this was scary. flying my mavic 3 classic out over a lake, maybe 400m out and about 80m altitude, and the video feed just dropped completely. like black screen, nothing. the drone kept flying in whatever direction it was going and i had no idea what it was looking at or where exactly it was pointing.

RTH kicked in after maybe 20 seconds of lost signal which i guess worked as intended but my heart was pounding the whole time. it came back fine but now im paranoid about going out over water again. i was on my RC controller, interference maybe? there were some other people around with phones and stuff but nothing i wouldve thought would cause that.

checked the flight logs and the RC signal stayed connected the whole time apparently, it was just the video feed that dropped. is that a known thing with these controllers or did i just get unlucky

yeah the video feed and the control link are actually two separate things on those RC controllers so one can drop while the other stays up, which is exactly what you described. its more common than people think, especially over water because the reflections can mess with the signal in weird ways. water is notoriously bad for RF in general.

a few things that help ? make sure your antennas on the RC are oriented correctly relative to the drone (people get lazy about this), and check if theres a firmware update pending because DJI pushed a fix a while back that helped with video dropouts in some edge cases. also worth checking if you were on 2.4ghz or 5.8ghz ? manually switching frequencies sometimes helps depending on local interference.

this happend to me once over a beach, scared the hell out of me. never figured out the exact cause but it never happened again after i updated the firmware so maybe that was it. flying over water is just nervewracking in general, i always make sure RTH altitude is set high enough before i go out over anything i cant land on