took both my mavic 2 pro and the air 3 out to a big open field to do some informal distance testing because ive been seeing a lot of back and forth on here about whether O3 pro is actually better than lightbridge in real conditions. and the short answer is it depends a lot more on the environment than i expected.

in clean open air with no obstructions the air 3 on O3 pro was noticeably more stable past about 3km. cleaner feed, less artifacting, barely any macro blocking even at 4k. the mavic 2 started getting that occasional hesitation in the feed around 2.5km like it always has. but then i moved to a spot closer to town with more 2.4ghz congestion from all the houses and the gap closed considerably. O3 seemed to degrade faster in the congested spectrum, at least in my unscientific one afternoon test.

not drawing huge conclusions from this, just found it interesting. anyone else noticed O3 having more trouble in suburban environments specifically? feels like lightbridge might have had better co-channel rejection but i could be totally wrong about that

your observation about suburban congestion matches what ive seen. O3 is doing a lot more adaptive frequency hopping than lightbridge ever did but that also means its more reactive to the environment rather than just bulldozing through on a fixed channel. in a really congested 5.8 environment it can spend time hunting for clean spectrum and during that hunting window you get the micro freezes. lightbridge was more brute force in a way. not necessarily better overall but different tradeoffs

also depends massively on antenna orientation which people underestimate. were you keeping the controller antennas pointed toward the drone the whole time or just holding it naturally? ive seen 30-40% effective range difference just from antenna angle on O3 controllers

honestly i just wanna know which one drops connection less near apartment buildings because thats basically my whole flying situation lol. the specs on paper dont help me much. sounds like maybe lightbridge would actually be better for me but its not like i can go buy a mavic 2 new anymore