Signal Interference

[SandiSCE]

I have been researching this problem, including a long chat with Ryze tech help, and so far have not found much for solving my problem. Has anyone else found a good working solution? Here is the situation:

My flying club has been getting together in a large ballroom at our community building to fly with obstacle gates. We have found that we get bad signal interference, which causes the Tello to just stop responding and hover where it is. There are 2 wifi hotspots in the room, but I have noticed this happening when outdoors as well: when I was flying with my grand daughter, we noticed the same behaviour when we or the Tellos were too close to each other. In the ballroom, we found that whenever 3 or 4 are flying at the same time, no matter how far apart from each other they are, they get signal interference. During the timed runs (for our little contest), we had just one flying at a time, but one of them still stopped dead in the middle of the run when the next pilot started prepping for their run.

Research suggests that the wifi signals from the hotspots are the problem, and the Tello automatically picks a channel based on how busy the channel is. Evidently there is no way to manually set the channel. Some folks, including Ryze tech, have suggested forgetting the building’s wifi, but that will cause problems for the pilots, as they will have to know how to dig that network back up on their phone when they are finished flying. This is a senior group, so I really don’t want to introduce that complication to their lives.

Has anyone here found a viable solution? We have about a dozen pilots, and that number is growing. Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[Hal C in TN]

Are you using WiFi repeaters? It might help filter out unwanted signals and give you longer range. Are you using the Tello app or the Tello FPV app? I'm having great luck using the repeater with the Tello FPV app. You probably want to have pilots about 5 yards apart.

 

[SandiSCE]

Are you using WiFi repeaters? It might help filter out unwanted signals and give you longer range. Are you using the Tello app or the Tello FPV app? I'm having great luck using the repeater with the Tello FPV app. You probably want to have pilots about 5 yards apart.

I haven’t used an extender although I have one. Does each pilot need to have their own? Several of us have the Tello FPV app; I will suggest they switch to that and see if it makes a difference. Agree about the five yards. During the practice time, though everyone is everywhere so it’s a little hard to enforce! Last time, we had several bystanders pop into to watch, and we noticed big interference as soon as we approached the gates in that corner, so we asked them to turn their phones off; it did help! Thanks for the suggestion!

 

[raulvolador]

You can try my Deauther trick for picking different WIFI channels.

Using Deauther stick for Tello picking WIFI channel

Cheers

Raul.

 

[Hal C in TN]

I haven’t used an extender although I have one. Does each pilot need to have their own? Several of us have the Tello FPV app; I will suggest they switch to that and see if it makes a difference. Agree about the five yards. During the practice time, though everyone is everywhere so it’s a little hard to enforce! Last time, we had several bystanders pop into to watch, and we noticed big interference as soon as we approached the gates in that corner, so we asked them to turn their phones off; it did help! Thanks for the suggestion!

It sounds like where you fly indoors is pretty much prone to interference. Without signal boost, you don't get much range outdoors either. You folks will probably benefit from using the WiFi repeater/extender because you would be increasing signal strength to cut down interference and increase your range. Forgetting other WiFi is a pain and probably unnecessary with the boosted signal.

The good news about doing that is it is fairly inexpensive to get one, but the bad news is they are a royal pain to install. The good news is that they only need to be installed once and there are several good sources for how in other forums both here and on YouTube.

One thing that is a bit pricey but super handy is to use a USB power station to power it. Available from several sources like Amazon, the Smartree DT30 has USB power out for the extender plus 3 Tello battery charging ports. A really great benefit is that you can charge 3 flight batteries at the same time. You can also set the unit with extender down several yards away from your flying station.

Being a "senior" myself, I can relate to wanting simplicity.... but I believe this is worth the initial hassle and expense. I got a lot of help from a lot of good folks here getting advice to make things work. It does sound like you have gathered a lot of pilots such as I haven't experienced. You may need to practice pilot discipline like you were flying 72MhZ in days gone by due to competing for 10 available WiFi channels. I highly recommend that you check out Raul's post linked above.

I hope this is helpful.

 

[SandiSCE]

So, 18 months later, I am reviewing these posts. My RC Aviation club had to adhere to lock down, and we have only just begun to fly again in the large ballroom we were using before. We are now at about 20 pilots, but not all of them are flying Tellos. We, of course, are having the signal interference problems. Reading all these posts and others which talk about extenders, deauthers, etc. I am still wondering how to solve our problem. To be clear, we are not looking to increase the flying range; we are just needing to prevent the signal interference and cross-connections. We find that a pilot can be all connected up and flying just fine, then her Tello stops mid-air and becomes completely unresponsive, and just hovers in place until the battery dies. I have talked everyone into using TelloFPV instead of the DJI stock app, and it's better, but we are still having the signal problems. We are even having problems with the controllers (T1ds), in that they work OK, then suddenly the Tello is not responding to them at all. It's as though another pilot has paired with that controller. Hard to pin down.

For the extenders to work, does EACH pilot have to have one for their Tello? And the deauther stick seems to work by disconnecting everyone from, say, channels 1-4 to force the Tellos to use channel 5. Doesn't that mean that all the Tellos present are going to use 5? Plus, won't that mean that when you turn on the deauther stick, any Tello that is on a channel from 1 through 4 will be kicked off and forced to use channel 5? Won't that just shift our signal problems to another channel? I don't see any way to use the deauther stick tool to make individual Tellos choose individual channels. Looking at the specs for the stick, that seems to be the case. You turn it on and it forces disconnect of all devices for all channels up to the one you want the Tello to choose. Does each pilot have to have his own deauther stick? That becomes rather expensive to retired folks!

So far, the things I see as checklist:
- everyone (even spectators) have to put their phones and tablets into airplane mode
- everyone needs to turn off their smart watches! (really? I don't think that will go over well)
- turn autojoin networks off completely
- turn on and pair controller first, then connect Tello wifi and start app (there seems to be some question as to whether this really works)

It is not clear to me whether the non-Tello pilots, who are mostly flying HS210s and HS170s, are causing any of the interference for the Tello pilots. Do any of you know about that?

From all that I've read, the really best and only solution is for Ryze to allow apps like TelloFPV to configure which channel the Tello chooses, period. Any hope of that?

In the meanwhile, does anyone have an updated suggestion for us retired folks trying to have fun?

thanks for all your help. I really do appreciate it!

 

[volate!lo]

There is no way to give Tello directions which Wifi channel to choose. Some time ago someone in this forum tried to force Tello to choose a specific channel, but I never really followed this. I think he basically created traffic on all other channels so Tello would choose the only free channel left.

The app (at least mine) has no way of controlling anything about the wifi connection to the drone, this is all managed by the underlying Android system. The app doesn't establish the connection, and doesn't drop the connection. The only thing it does is monitor that a connection to tello exists.

 

[Demedia]

So, 18 months later, I am reviewing these posts. My RC Aviation club had to adhere to lock down, and we have only just begun to fly again in the large ballroom we were using before. We are now at about 20 pilots, but not all of them are flying Tellos. We, of course, are having the signal interference problems. Reading all these posts and others which talk about extenders, deauthers, etc. I am still wondering how to solve our problem. To be clear, we are not looking to increase the flying range; we are just needing to prevent the signal interference and cross-connections. We find that a pilot can be all connected up and flying just fine, then her Tello stops mid-air and becomes completely unresponsive, and just hovers in place until the battery dies. I have talked everyone into using TelloFPV instead of the DJI stock app, and it's better, but we are still having the signal problems. We are even having problems with the controllers (T1ds), in that they work OK, then suddenly the Tello is not responding to them at all. It's as though another pilot has paired with that controller. Hard to pin down.

For the extenders to work, does EACH pilot have to have one for their Tello? And the deauther stick seems to work by disconnecting everyone from, say, channels 1-4 to force the Tellos to use channel 5. Doesn't that mean that all the Tellos present are going to use 5? Plus, won't that mean that when you turn on the deauther stick, any Tello that is on a channel from 1 through 4 will be kicked off and forced to use channel 5? Won't that just shift our signal problems to another channel? I don't see any way to use the deauther stick tool to make individual Tellos choose individual channels. Looking at the specs for the stick, that seems to be the case. You turn it on and it forces disconnect of all devices for all channels up to the one you want the Tello to choose. Does each pilot have to have his own deauther stick? That becomes rather expensive to retired folks!

So far, the things I see as checklist:
- everyone (even spectators) have to put their phones and tablets into airplane mode
- everyone needs to turn off their smart watches! (really? I don't think that will go over well)
- turn autojoin networks off completely
- turn on and pair controller first, then connect Tello wifi and start app (there seems to be some question as to whether this really works)

It is not clear to me whether the non-Tello pilots, who are mostly flying HS210s and HS170s, are causing any of the interference for the Tello pilots. Do any of you know about that?

From all that I've read, the really best and only solution is for Ryze to allow apps like TelloFPV to configure which channel the Tello chooses, period. Any hope of that?

In the meanwhile, does anyone have an updated suggestion for us retired folks trying to have fun?

thanks for all your help. I really do appreciate it!

I've been dealing with the same issue for moths. I'm experimenting with repeaters and routers (in ext mode). Linking each drone to an extender individually. My best guess is that increasing the signal strength creates a steadier connection. I'll share the results when I'm done.

 

[Hacky]

For those, who just want to fly around but do not need the camera feed, Tello EDU might be an option. These can be configured to share an existing WLan as client.

But this requires that the app, controlling it, is able to connect to configurable IP adresses.