Poor GPS Fix
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Hello everyone,
We’ve been following this discussion with great interest — especially the insights about the mast kit and the copper shielding solution. We also tried similar approaches on our side and wanted to share our results to contribute to the thread.
We purchased four Starling 2 Max drones for our project at the beginning of the year, and like others here, we are experiencing difficulties with GPS stability outdoors. To mitigate interference, we designed and 3D-printed our own GPS mount to move the antenna away from the main body, and we added a copper shielding layer around it.
We then tested the u-blox M10 GPS outside, under clear sky conditions, with the drone powered on (connected via Wi-Fi to use VOXL-Portal). Over about 10 minutes, the best observation we captured showed 18 satellites with an average SNR around 30–35 dB.
However, despite these results, we still cannot achieve a stable outdoor localization, which currently prevents us from flying the drones properly outside. At this point, we’re unsure whether the problem comes mainly from the GPS performance or possibly from the barometer.
We’d really appreciate:
- Being included in your support list for this GPS issue, since it affects multiple units on our side (as mentioned by @Alex-Kushleyev).
- Any guidance or recommendations on how to debug further (extra shielding, hardware setup, barometer validation, software settings, etc.).
Thanks a lot to the ModalAI team and to the community for the shared ideas — we hope our feedback helps others as well.
Best regards,
Quentin
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P paulpeshette referenced this topic on
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Hello everyone,
We’ve been following this discussion with great interest — especially the insights about the mast kit and the copper shielding solution. We also tried similar approaches on our side and wanted to share our results to contribute to the thread.
We purchased four Starling 2 Max drones for our project at the beginning of the year, and like others here, we are experiencing difficulties with GPS stability outdoors. To mitigate interference, we designed and 3D-printed our own GPS mount to move the antenna away from the main body, and we added a copper shielding layer around it.
We then tested the u-blox M10 GPS outside, under clear sky conditions, with the drone powered on (connected via Wi-Fi to use VOXL-Portal). Over about 10 minutes, the best observation we captured showed 18 satellites with an average SNR around 30–35 dB.
However, despite these results, we still cannot achieve a stable outdoor localization, which currently prevents us from flying the drones properly outside. At this point, we’re unsure whether the problem comes mainly from the GPS performance or possibly from the barometer.
We’d really appreciate:
- Being included in your support list for this GPS issue, since it affects multiple units on our side (as mentioned by @Alex-Kushleyev).
- Any guidance or recommendations on how to debug further (extra shielding, hardware setup, barometer validation, software settings, etc.).
Thanks a lot to the ModalAI team and to the community for the shared ideas — we hope our feedback helps others as well.
Best regards,
Quentin
we just posted an update on this topic, please see https://forum.modalai.com/topic/5116/gnss-emi-mitigation-guidelines .
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