No Fly Zone Based on GPS Signal of Phone

[CzarMark]

Last time out flying my Breeze, I ran into an issue. After startup and choosing a Task, I was presented with the Height warning due to being in a No Fly Zone. I have flown my Breeze at this location many times and have never encountered this warning. The reason I chose this location initially was because I had checked the No Fly Zone maps and found that I was far enough away from our local airport.

I suspected that the GPS on my iPhone 6 (not on the Breeze) may not be enabled. To verify, I checked my Maps app and, sure enough, the Maps app indicated that I was still at home - not where I actually was. My home is about 1 mile from a major airport. It appears as though the Breeze Cam app uses the GPS coordinates of the phone, not the Breeze, to determine take-off requirements.

The GPS on my iPhone 6 goes dormant from time to time - a shutdown and restart of the phone usually wakes it up. So I shutdown my phone and then restarted it. I then went through the complete Breeze startup, connect, and task selection processes with no Height or No Fly Zone restrictions.

This raised a few questions for me:

1) Why does the Breeze use the GPS position of the phone and not the GPS position of the Breeze itself when determining its location at Startup? Is this GPS position saved by the Breeze as the Take-Off point?
2) What would have happened if I continued flying the Breeze with the GPS of my phone not working and then initiated the Return to Home (RTH) function? Would the Breeze have attempted to fly back to my home? Or if I had lost wifi connection to the Breeze - would it have initiated the RTH itself and attempted to fly back to my home?
3) If the GPS position of my phone wasn't working, how could the Smart Follow Me mode work?

Curious if anyone else has run into this...

 

[DoomMeister]

Hey Mark,

1. I found it to be strange that the phone GPS was used for NFZ determination. The phone is NOT used for takeoff point position.

2. No on both counts. It will return to the takeoff point determined by the Breeze position at launch. This can be verified when using a WiFi repeater and landing the Breeze near the geofence then launching again to extend the geofence another 100 meters.

3. If the GPS on your phone is not tracking your position, the Smart Follow Me mode will not work.

 

[CzarMark]

@DoomMeister - How can you be sure that the phone GPS position is NOT being used for takeoff point position? Do you know of some Yuneec documentation that indicates which GPS coordinates are used at takeoff? Why would the NFZ warning be displayed? I surely want to believe you, however, I really don't want to test it. It seems to me this situation could explain some flyaways.

 

[DoomMeister]

Watch the video in this post Breeze Range Extender. It shows the new takeoff point is where he lands near the geofence. Thus proving the takeoff point is set via the Breeze GPS position.

 

[airborne]

I can confirm that one's phone GPS data is used to deceide whether in or out of a NFZ. Reason might be that the NFZ data is stored in the cam-app and not in the breeze. The cam-apps prior to 4Q of 2016 (or 1Q 2017 ??? not sure) did not have NFZs implemented. This statement goes for android phones, not sure about IOS, but @CzarMark has an IPhone, so it might be valid there as well.

RTH on the other hand is done with the breeze's GPS data.

A way to test is might be to fool the smartphone by entering the GPS coordinates of a major airport and try to take off. With android phones there is a menu under advanced developers options where one can enter bogous GSP locations.

 

[CzarMark]

@airborne That makes sense. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to spoof a GPS location on my iPhone.