curious what people are actually doing in practice here. i fly a lot in and around a medium sized city and ive gone back and forth on this for a while. the conventional wisdom i always see is that 5.8 is cleaner because theres less legacy wifi on it but honestly in my experience lately that doesnt seem to hold anymore because everyone and their dog has an ax router pumping out 5ghz now.

my current setup is a mini 4 pro with the RC2 and ive mostly been leaving it on auto and letting DJI's link management do its thing. works okay but i had one sketchy moment flying near an apartment block last month where i dropped to like 1 bar and the video got choppy for a solid 10 seconds. nothing bad happened but it made me think maybe i should be more deliberate about which band im on before i take off rather than just trusting auto.

do any of you pre-scan the environment or just pick one and go with it? and has anyone actually noticed a real world difference forcing one band over the other in a dense urban area

honestly i just leave it on auto most of the time. i know thats not the exciting answer but DJI's adaptive switching has gotten pretty decent and manually picking wrong is probably worse than letting the system handle it. the one thing id say is that if youre flying somewhere with a lot of buildings and wifi, getting your controller antenna orientation right matters more than the band selection anyway. people underestimate how much antenna polarization affects link quality, especially when youre maneuvering and the angle keeps changing.

i pre scan every single time, takes 30 seconds with a spectrum analyzer app and has saved me more than once. found a spot last spring that looked totally clear visually but was absolutely saturated on 5.8 from some kind of point to point link on a nearby building, would never have known without checking. switched to 2.4 and had a perfect flight. its a bit overkill maybe but once you have a scare you start doing the extra steps

also worth mentioning that if you're flying near any kind of event venue or sports stadium even on off days, the temporary wifi infrastructure they leave up is insane. ran into that situation twice and both times 2.4 was the better choice ironically because the event gear was all on 5ghz commercial channels.