Yesterday we had cold clear weather, but it was very windy (I think wind speeds up to 30-40 km/h on the ground).
I had never flown the Armo in such windy conditions, so I decided to give it a try.
The flying itself was not so difficult, the Lageregelung does an excellent job of dealing with the wind and turbulence, hovering is very stable, just need to keep it tilted to avoid getting blown away by the wind.
Then I decided it would be a good idea to find out how my current GPS settings would work in these strong winds... BIG mistake
At first it went well: when switching on PH it got a little blown away initially, but it slowly moved back, and leaned nicely into the wind. CH also worked, although it was quite slow to fly upwind (that should have been a clue to me!!!).
The turbulence caused some violent height deviations (probably also due to the fact that I have no closed Haube on my temporary frame), so I decided to climb a bit as added safety margin.
I then yawed it a few turns left and right to see how badly it would move around, but apparently the wind was MUCH stronger there (now flying well above any trees). Before I knew what happened it was blown so far away that it was just a little dot, no way to see which way it was pointing. (I have to admit that I was a bit disoriented by my own Pirouetten)
I had no laptop with me to have a quick look on the mission or instrument screen
).No panic, just switch to CH, right?
Well, at first it seemed to be coming back slowly, but as time passed, it became clear that it wasn't. I tried manual flight, but I simply could not see which way it went, it was too far away... then it went completely out of sight behind the trees, several hundred meters away
This was 8 minutes into the flight, with less than 3 minutes remaining in the battery... 
So I started running towards it, in the hope that I would at least see or hear the crash...
Then, after it had been out of sight behind the trees for at least a full minute, I could hear it flying! Just as I looked up, it appeared from above the trees, almost directly over my head
It was still struggling to fly back to the original home position.I landed it immediately (with about 90 seconds remaining in the battery), and after catching my breath I took off again just to try CH again at low altitude. It moved correctly, but very slowly against the wind. Sometimes it would be blown back by a gust of wind, even at this low altitude.
That confirmed what I already suspected while it was "lost": the GPS_MAX_ANGLE was simply insufficient for these wind speeds...
I should have known that: I already experimented with high CH speeds in calm conditions, and found out that about 27 km/h was the maximum it would reach with the default setting.
I was incredibly lucky: the wind must have temporarily decreased a little bit, so that it came back in sight and I was able to land it right in front of me.
If I would have had some real-time data available like in the OSD (heading, home heading,...) , this would have been a complete non-event.
It isn't always handy to have a laptop around, so a small display with some data would be nice... Anybody making progress on that?
brgds,
geert
Hatte ja ein ähnliches Erlebniss wo ich meinen ersten FPV Versuch im Garten bei viel Wind gestartet habe.... war so schlau und hab mir die Brille aufgezogen wärend der Armo schräg gegen den Wind im PH stand, 15m hoch in etwa. Bis dahin wars auch ganz witzig, die Aussicht genossen und alles war gut. Dann habe ich aber den Fehler gemacht und wollte leicht nach vorn fliegen. Leicht! Ohne PHMove! Das leichte antippen des Sticks schaltete also PH aus, der Kopter stellte sich natürlich nicht mehr allein gegen den Wind und bis ich das im Display erkennen konnte hörte ich schon den Kopter über mir hinters Haus abhauen. Und natüüürlich war dann auch der Videolink weg