gonna preface this by saying ive been flying for about 3 years so im not totally clueless but signal stuff genuinely confuses me still. im flying in a pretty dense suburban area, lots of wifi routers everywhere obviously, and ive been going back and forth on whether to lock my transmitter to 5.8ghz or just leave it on auto.

the common wisdom ive always heard is that 5.8 is less crowded in residential areas since most routers defaulted to 2.4 for years. but now everyone and their grandmother has a wifi 6 router blasting 5ghz channels so i genuinely dont know if that advice is still valid. my TX16S with my freestyle quad on Crossfire is a totally different story but im talking about the DJI ecosystem stuff specifically, the O3 system on my avata 2.

whats peoples actual real world experience been in suburbs? i get occasional video stutters and wondering if band selection is part of it or if im just chasing ghosts here

honestly in my experience the auto mode on O3 is better than most people give it credit for, it does a spectrum scan at startup and picks based on what it sees. the issue is it doesnt adapt mid flight which can bite you if conditions change. i fly in a pretty busy area and leaving it on auto has been fine 90% of the time. the stutters you're seeing could just as easily be multipath from flying between houses as actual frequency congestion.

if you want to really dig into it theres wifi analyzer apps for android that show you channel utilization and you can see exactly how crowded each band actually is where you are. might be worth doing before assuming its a band issue

crossfire mentioned and now im jealous lol. yeah the DJI stuff is a different beast, you dont get the same kind of manual control. i switched to 5.8 lock after getting some weird behavior near a school that had like 30 access points and it did seem to help but honestly hard to say if it was that or just coincidence. suburban flying is just noisy and sometimes theres not a clean fix