so this was my third tower job and the first two went completely fine but today was a mess. flying an autel evo 2 pro around a 200ft monopole and about halfway through my orbit i started getting really erratic yaw behavior, thing was rotating on its own and fighting my inputs. managed to land it safely but lost like 15 minutes of footage and had to explain to the client why i couldnt complete the upper section

my best guess is RF interference from the active antennas on the tower, i knew this was a risk going in but the client said it was low power equipment so i maybe underestimated it. has anyone dealt with this and is there a way to fly closer without getting the compass going haywire or do i just need to accept a certain standoff distance on active towers

also now im second guessing whether my pre-flight checklist is thorough enough for tower jobs specifically, like is there stuff i should be checking that im not

active towers are a whole different animal, ive had similar issues and the culprit is almost always compass interference when you get inside a certain radius. the thing is the autel handles it differently than a phantom or mavic would, some people swear by switching to atti mode and flying manually for the close passes but thats obviously not for everyone and you lose a lot of the safety net

what i do now is always get the frequency and power output data from the client before i even show up, not just their word for it that its low power. had a client tell me something was barely transmitting and it turned out to be running full power on a band that absolutely wrecked my compass. also a standoff of at least 15 to 20 feet on active antennas is my minimum now regardless of what they tell me about power levels

did you do a compass calibration on site before the flight? i know it sounds basic but i skipped it once on a tower job because i had calibrated at home that morning and it bit me. also curious what your GPS lock looked like during the erratic behavior, if you were on the lee side of the tower structure you might have had a partial block on satellites which wouldnt help