Originally Posted by
helimutt
Lets take a Phantom 4 'drone' or UAV.
To climb to 11'000 feet is perfectly achievable.
I own and fly a P4 as a hobby in Colorado US.
11K feet is not possible unless you started out at ~9,400 ft above sea level. Obviously doable where I live but not in the UK for example. Out of the box DGI sets AGL (above ground level) at 120 M (~400 feet the limit for recreational UAW use in the US and UK). It simply won't let you fly higher. You can set the AGL limit to 500M (~1,600 ft) which is valid for flying up a mountain while maintaining 400 ft AGL. Sure that also means you can fly to 1,600 AGL anywhere and break the rules/law but that's it, they won't go higher than 1,600 feet from take off point. I leave mine at 120M unless I'm in the hills.
I have read 100s of forum/redit/twiter/facebook posts from folks asking how to hack the 500M limit and it's simple not possible, no one has managed to hack the firmware since these were introduced (March 2016). There was a bug in the Phantom 3s (fixed years ago), you could fly to 500M, reset the home point and fly up another 500M, rinse and repeat.
The home point coords for RTH are set via the internal GPS but the AGL is monitored by barometer only. Personally I think the AGL limit is hardware set in the barometer but I'm not sure 100% and DGI keep this info provate.
Anyhow most drone owners are responsible granted some are not or ignorant. P4s were about $1500 and just dropped in price to $1100, the new P4Pro is about $1500, in 6 months time the P5 will cost about $1500 and the P4Pro will drop. You get the picture, crashing your new $1,500 toy is no fun and difficult to explain to the wife unit
