took some shots near a substation yesterday for a client and honestly the whole experience was kind of unsettling. not a total disaster but the video feed was noticeably jittery, had like 3 or 4 brief signal warnings pop up on the RC, and the compass kept throwing caution messages. i knew it was going to be a sketchy environment going in but the client wanted the shots so whatever.

im mostly just curious how much of this is actual EMI from the high voltage lines versus me just being in a more congested RF environment generally because its an industrial area. like is there a meaningful difference in what power line interference does to the signal versus just regular wifi channel saturation. ended up getting the shots but kept it within 150m and stayed pretty conservative with altitude. felt like i was flying through soup the whole time.

yeah power infrastructure is genuinely one of the worst environments you can fly in. high voltage transmission lines emit broadband EMI that doesnt really behave like wifi interference ? its not on a specific channel you can tune around, it just raises the noise floor across a wide chunk of spectrum. your compass warnings were probably magnetic field disturbance from the current in the lines which is a separate problem from the RF stuff. the two combined is kind of a worst case scenario for any GPS/RF dependent aircraft tbh.

the fact that you stayed close and conservative was smart. ive heard of people losing aircraft completely near large substations, not just signal glitches but full flyaways because the compass data got corrupted and the bird had no idea where it was pointed.

this is kind of tangential but i did a shoot near some high tension lines once and put the drone in atti mode manually just so i wasnt fighting bad GPS data the whole time. made it way easier to control actually, at least you know what the aircraft is working with instead of it trying to hold position using garbage compass readings. might not work for everyone depending on comfort level but it helped me