genuine question because ive been going back and forth on this forever and i feel like every thread about it ends up in people just talking past each other. im in a pretty dense suburban area, lots of wifi networks everywhere, neighbors have mesh systems, theres a school with a ton of access points about 400m away from my usual launch spot.

ive been defaulting to 2.4 because i always assumed 5.8 drops off too fast and the penetration isnt as good, but a guy at my local club swears by 5.8 in urban environments because theres just less congestion on it for RC use specifically. his argument is that yeah wifi uses 5ghz too but most of it is on channels that dont overlap with what the RC systems actually use.

i dunno. i fly a DJI O3 system mostly so im kind of at the mercy of whatever the auto mode decides anyway. does anyone actually manually lock their frequency and see a measurable difference or is this mostly theoretical at this point with modern systems

your club guy isnt wrong exactly but its more complicated than that. 5ghz wifi is everywhere now and a lot of routers are broadcasting on channels that absolutely do stomp on O3 frequencies depending on your region. the auto mode on O3 is honestly pretty good at avoiding this in my experience, like better than my own manual guessing, but there are edge cases where it just keeps bouncing and you get choppy video even when the RC link itself is fine.

what i do sometimes is use a wifi analyzer app before flying, just to see whats actually saturated in the area. if 2.4 is an absolute wall of noise ill try forcing 5.8 and vice versa. its not scientific but it gives me a bit more confidence than just trusting the auto and hoping. that said ive probably overthought this more than it deserves, most of my actual disconnects have been operator error or wind messing with my positioning not frequency stuff.

tbh i just leave mine on auto and havnt had a real disconnect in ages. maybe im lucky or maybe the O3 system just handles it well enough that its not worth stressing. the only time i manually switched was when i was flying near a stadium on game day and the 2.4 band was basically unusable, switched to 5.8 and it was fine.