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Should I go or should I stay?

To those of you who may not have been around for more than a few months; the history of Yuneec is worth noting.

The high point of Yuneec, most will agree, happened somewhere between the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017. In those days Yuneec customer service was TOPS. When the 480 came out, naturally it had some bugs and by mid 2017 all that was going to be done, in terms of updates and improvements was over. I'll try to keep this short and give it to you like cliff notes. ;)

The 520 was rumored and the masses yearned. the original date came and passed but eventually it arrived in limited numbers - at a premium price - and with a number of it's own problems which; some were addressed, while others may not have been. I am not too familiar with that one.

Again Yuneec made rumors and hype about the Plus - missing its intended role out period, but eventually hitting in Mid 2018. It was an improvement over the 480 in some areas while was lacking in others (Cruise Control). Then we went on a year-and-a-half roller coaster ride waiting for the next update praying some of the bugs would be fixed and some of the former functions would be returned. Meanwhile we were still trying to figure out just how everything worked. Yuneec made subtle changes in things like - how CCC worked but never mentioned it, or told in the manual, so we waited and experimented.

There were many threads such as this where a member would pose the same "what do you want" type of question about the Plus and all eagerly put in their bid. About that time I was contacted by someone claiming to be with Yuneec China and we started a dialogue in regards to what needed to be fixed. He eventually told me to go public with this news and we did. For the next several months he was on this forum and many of us thought this might be the turning point where Yuneec got their stuff together. As it turned out, we do believe this person was working as an engineer for Yuneec, but what his true purpose was is still anyone's guess. Chinese companies do not typically ask their customers what they want - they run from the top down - much like their government.

Long story short - it never happened and eventually our Yuneec contact faded into the past. Sometime later the H3 was leaked and while hopes were high, no one was holding their breath this time. Eventually it plopped out out to the stage in a very limited number - much like the 520 but at close to 700.00 more than the Plus. We still don't know much about it because there are so few that have them and it takes a lot of people with a lot of dedication to take a product like the Plus and go through it with a fine toothed comb and document for the masses every detail. We do know that cruise was put back on the H3 which to many of us was a stab in the back because we know it would be a simple affair to give it to us Plus and 520 owners.

Bottom line. It's not very likely to happen. Yuneec has moved beyond all models and that probably includes the H3. Those of us who still have working examples should enjoy them for as long as we can scrounge whatever is needed to keep them in the air. If you have a working Plus, congratulations as I firmly believe it was, and is, the apex of the Yuneec Consumer Drone line. While it may have some issues - the grass on the other side is no greener, I have been there too.

I agree that the H Plus is pretty much the best bird of the bunch, but the battery life is terrible. I am waiting for a firmware upgrade, but don't have much hope to see anything coming soon to solve some of the bugs of the last update. I always have to relink my C23 camera on startup which surprises me. Anyone else having the same issues?
 
Tom, there is a mod that can be done or purchased to use an aftermarket charger that will give you the options of visible cell data and storage charge capabilities.
That in itself increases the overall life span of a lipo, that way you're not limited to guestimating whether or not the charge state of your batteries.
this is the mod I did for my H, mines not the H+ but it's the same mod for mine and it works, if you're not very good at hobby soldering then,

There is a vendor that will do the mod for you, sells them ready to go, just have to find the ad, then I'll get back to ya unless someone else has it ready to add,

But I would suggest you go to the H+ forum and ask, you'll have better luck with your question there than tagged onto another topic thread such as this one.
 
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I appreciate you all sharing. My batteries for the th+ are on their last legs, and I'm debating on investing in a drone with no support and no parts but a great camera or something new... Tough choice.

You can buy drones that will only accept an expensive, proprietary battery or you can buy drones that will allow adaptation of standard batteries after the OEM stops making batteries. Your choice.

All the Chroma, Typhoon, and Tornado models can be modified to accept commonly available batteries. You need only be willing to make an easy modification.
 
Great job, Patrick! Your videos inspire me to get out more to fly my H Plus. I am still quite unhappy with the battery life even though I follow the don't store fully charged modo. What kind of life are you getting with your H Plus? What batteries are you using?

Thanks Tom, yeah the batteries are one of those things that Yuneec did on the Plus that I believe was a step backward. The LiHV's give good performance for the first 40 or so flights and then start to drop off rapidly. When I first got my Plus I could get 19 minutes easily before the first low battery warning. Now those two original batteries are good for maybe 13 minutes at best, each of them has around 120 flights now.

As a side note you can use the 480 LiPo battery's in a Plus and surprisingly will get similar performance, the only down side is; due to the slightly different voltages, the 480 battery will hit 'low batt' on the Plus when it is still at around 50%!! Or right at storage level which means it can be flown for several minutes into the low battery warning while not haveing the battery fall to low. Some guys say they don't mind seeing the warning every 30 seconds but it's hard to keep flying when you have to deal with that. In addition, the third warning automatically triggers RTH so you have to be ready to flip the mode switch to cancel.

I have often thought if we could get into the software and reset the low voltage warning we could solve this but I don't think thats going to happen.

My Plan is to just buy 480 batteries if I can still get charge leads if not, I was one of the lucky ones that bought charge leads for the Plus when they were available so I can still charge them on my aftermarket charger and keep them in as good a shape as possible.
 
Great job, Patrick! Your videos inspire me to get out more to fly my H Plus. I am still quite unhappy with the battery life even though I follow the don't store fully charged modo. What kind of life are you getting with your H Plus? What batteries are you using?

I have 2 of these and have had (so far) good luck with them. About 19 minutes flying time.
 
What other drone would you purchase that the manufacturer is going to be any better than Yuneec?
Not sayin' Yuneec is better, no worse than others is all.

They have their pro's & con's,
All of them do,

I don't see that there's a choice to be made Mike, easier to stay cause you're already here.
Better the devil you know!
 
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If the current trade situation between China and the US had anything to do with it - DJI would also be hurting and while one could argue that they are, the release of the Mavic Mini seems to be a hit and just today they released the Mavic Air 2 with some surprising features at less than one third the cost of an H3. Not to mention spare parts and so forth for any of the DJI line are overwhelmingly abundant here. So I don't really see us stopping the massive trade imbalance with China has had anything to do with Yuneec's downfall here in the US.
I thought I read that the lights are going out with dji in the US as well. It would appear to me that the US/ China trade relations are having something to do with it possibly.
 
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I don't think so as far as the "Trade Relations" go, it's more of profit VS manufacture cost.
If there is a market they will find a way to get there,,,,,

At first there was a high demand, lot's of sales, some to people that went out and had a lot of fun, made video'son YT made money and so forth, then there were a bunch of people that purchased them and didn't stop to realize there is a lot more to it than plug in a battery and it flies itself around entertaining you.

The second group quickly started to resale and more people learned the same lesson, a small number of those people understood and learned to fly & photo, made a hobby out of it and are still with it.

But new sales dropped off, so out came the changes & upgrades to stimulate new sales, but as time went on there just isn't enough new sales to keep the manufactures interested because there's not a lot of profit in it for them now.

There's only one thing that keeps a manufacture interested in support, profit.

DJI was/is the #1 hobby/photo drone manufacturer, Yuneec is #2.

This is what I believe, my opinion, and for research I consider the shear number of video's and CL resale ad's.

The ratio is about 8 DJI drones to 2 Yuneec drones per page of drones for sale on CL, but now with a majority of people who were willing to spend recreational money on the hobby now stretching it just to make monthly bills all sales have plummeted and manufacturers don't hang around long.
 
The way the drone market had been working the manufacturers, specifically DJI, were churning out a new model every 6-9 months. Every minor upgrade made by DJI required purchasing a new model to obtain the upgrade. Smart move by DJI realizing that stupid people would pay a grand or more over and over for items providing very little additional value for the successive model. DJI sold a lot of different models, and to sweeten the pot most of them could not use batteries for the previous model. It took Yuneec a little while to figure out they needed to play a similar game.


There’s a lot of people that spent wads of cash on multiple DJI models that are likely now broke or staring at maxed out credit limits. There’s a few Yuneec owners in the same boat.

Some regulatory actions by the U.S. government is impacting DJI as well. Their efforts to infiltrate government agencies with their software and hardware recently hit a brick wall.
 
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Absolutely NOTHING. There isn’t any new drone or features that Yuneec could produce that will tempt me to part with my money.

My confidence in YUNEEC as a company, who will support their products and customers, is so low as to be non-existent. Yuneec will need to make so many changes in the way they do business before I’ll spend any money at all on them. I want to hope though, I want to believe....but I just don’t think it’s going to happen. This includes a blooming 3rd party market with accessories and batteries.

Too bad. Really great platform. I really like my Typhoons and hope to keep flying them as long as possible. I’m not completely on my own though as this forum provides better Customer Service than Yuneec does.
I agree completely. I've had so many issues with the H520 and it's controller and absolutely no response from Yuneec when I contact them, I don't think I could ever justify buying from them again or trusting their service. I've already been looking at other drone manufacturers for when our H520 dies, more pricey but in my opinion well worth it.
 
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Thanks Tom, yeah the batteries are one of those things that Yuneec did on the Plus that I believe was a step backward. The LiHV's give good performance for the first 40 or so flights and then start to drop off rapidly. When I first got my Plus I could get 19 minutes easily before the first low battery warning. Now those two original batteries are good for maybe 13 minutes at best, each of them has around 120 flights now.

As a side note you can use the 480 LiPo battery's in a Plus and surprisingly will get similar performance, the only down side is; due to the slightly different voltages, the 480 battery will hit 'low batt' on the Plus when it is still at around 50%!! Or right at storage level which means it can be flown for several minutes into the low battery warning while not haveing the battery fall to low. Some guys say they don't mind seeing the warning every 30 seconds but it's hard to keep flying when you have to deal with that. In addition, the third warning automatically triggers RTH so you have to be ready to flip the mode switch to cancel.

I have often thought if we could get into the software and reset the low voltage warning we could solve this but I don't think thats going to happen.

My Plan is to just buy 480 batteries if I can still get charge leads if not, I was one of the lucky ones that bought charge leads for the Plus when they were available so I can still charge them on my aftermarket charger and keep them in as good a shape as possible.
Thanks for all the info Patrick. Too bad about the battery life on the H Plus standard batteries. I only have two out of four batteries that I now can trust to fly my H Plus any distance away from the home point. I just checked to see about ordering a couple more and see that they are really difficult to find.
 
I have 2 of these and have had (so far) good luck with them. About 19 minutes flying time.
Thanks for the buying tip, Patrick. I just ordered one of the batteries from them. No charge for shipping. If I like the flight time I will get another one.
 
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Thanks for the buying tip, Patrick. I just ordered one of the batteries from them. No charge for shipping. If I like the flight time I will get another one.
If this battery lasts as long as I hope it does, it will give me hope that I can fly further away with my H Plus. I will certainly provide my feedback after a few flights.
 

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