What To Do If You Can’t Find Your Drone’s Wi-fi?

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) (or uncrewed aerial vehicle, commonly known as a drone and rarely as an uninhabited aerial vehicle or unoccupied aerial vehicle) is an aircraft without a human pilot on board and a type of unmanned vehicle. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS); which include a UAV, a ground-based controller, and a system of communications between the two.

The flight of UAVs may operate with various degrees of autonomy: either under remote control by a human operator, autonomously by onboard computers  or piloted by an autonomous robot.

Compared to crewed aircraft, UAVs were originally used for missions too “dull, dirty or dangerous” for humans. While they originated mostly in military applications, their use is rapidly expanding to commercial, scientific, recreational, agricultural, and other applications, such as policing and surveillance, product deliveries, aerial photography, infrastructure inspections, smuggling, and drone racing.

Civilian UAVs now vastly outnumber military UAVs, with estimates of over a million sold by 2015.

So what do you do if you can’t find your drone’s wifi?

There are a couple of different things you can try to find your drones wifi. You can do a reset of the drone and controller, or disconnecting and reconnecting the wifi. You can also make sure the drone and controller are on the same frequency.

If you want to see the best drones that we love, you can find them by clicking here. 

If you would like to know more about what to do if you cannot find your drones wifi, please keep reading and check out this article!

Drone Communications

Most UAVs use a radio for remote control and exchange of video and other data. original UAVs had only narrowband uplink. Downlinks actually ended up coming later. These bi-directional narrowband radio links carried command and control (C&C) and telemetry data about the status of aircraft systems to the remote operator. For very long range flights, military UAVs also use satellite receivers as part of satellite navigation systems. In cases when video transmission was required, the UAVs will implement a separate analog video radio link.

In most modern UAV applications, video transmission is required. So instead of having 2 separate links for C&C, telemetry and video traffic, a broadband link is used to carry all types of data on a single radio link. These broadband links can leverage quality of service techniques to optimize the C&C traffic for low latency. Usually these broadband links carry TCP/IP traffic that can be routed over the Internet.

The radio signal from the operator side can be issued from either:

• Ground control – a human operating a radio transmitter/receiver, a smartphone, a tablet, a computer, or the original meaning of a military ground control station (GCS). Recently control from wearable devices, human movement recognition, human brain waves was also demonstrated.
• Remote network system, such as satellite duplex data links for some military powers. Downstream digital video over mobile networks has also entered consumer markets, while direct UAV control uplink over the cellular mesh and LTE have been demonstrated and are in trials.
• Another aircraft, serving as a relay or mobile control station – military manned-unmanned teaming (MUM-T).
• A protocol MAVLink is increasingly becoming popular to carry command and control data between the ground control and the vehicle

As mobile networks have increased in performance and reliability over the years, drones have begun to use mobile networks for communication. Mobile networks can be used for drone tracking, remote piloting, over the air updates, and cloud computing.

Modern networking standards have explicitly considered drones and therefore include optimizations. The 5G standard has mandated reduced user plane latency to 1ms while using ultra-reliable and low-latency communications.

Below is a list of things that you can do if you cannot find your drones Wi-fi.

Hard Reset Procedure

Firstly, you will need to turn on the device. Next, you will need to press the power button for eight (8) seconds until the battery’s led light turns red. When all of the lights turn red you may release the button. After that, there should be a TXT file to check if your network’s password has been reset.

Other Reset Procedures

You may need to plug the battery into a charger then press and hold the power button for 15 seconds. Then, you will need to reinstall the battery in the device and then power it up. Press and hold again the button for 12 seconds for a reset. You may now connect your phone to the controller. Once the controller is connected to the drone, you may now hit the drone icon and then you will now see a map and numbers.

Connect To Wi-Fi

If you are using an Android phone, you will need to navigate your phone and go to the phone’s settings. Next, you will need to look for the wireless networks and then click wi-fi. Select the name of your drone and then wait for your mobile phone to connect. Automatically when the drone is turned on, its Wi-Fi is then visible.

Do Drones Need Wi-Fi

Although some drones do, it is not necessarily true. Yuneec and Dji are two companies producing drones that do not require Wi-Fi. Though drones do require you to download an app for the navigation and flight control of the drone, it might require an internet connection to activate your drone.

Aerial Networks

There is a gigantic growth in the number of connected wireless devices that leads to an increase in network connectivity. A concept paper was done for answering the potential of wireless connectivity through aerial networks. A paper was published to describe and analyze the promising applications of drones. It is an experimental system that deploys aerial Wi-Fi networks using the Intel Galileo development board that was configured and equipped with Wi-Fi. 

These play the role of an access point in the infrastructure mode or an intermediate hop in the ad-hoc operational mode. Then this device was integrated onboard a drone. They then compared the Wi-Fi mode in terms of coverage area, throughput and energy efficiency. They then revealed that the infrastructure mode is way better than the ad-hoc. However in terms of responsiveness, ad-hoc is much better than the infrastructure mode.

Connecting Drones

It is possible that your drone is not connected to your mobile phone. This issue may lead to some very serious problems. This interruption might be caused by a low battery. So you need to check if the batteries are fully charged and if it is enough to power-up your drones.

There is another possible way of connecting to drone Wi-Fi. It can be solved by modifying the IP settings of your phone to connect to the drone’s Wi-Fi. On your phones available Wi-Fi networks,you will need to tap the name of your drone. Click the drone’s name and then find the word “modify”. 

Change the IP setting from DHCP to Static that is under an advanced setting. Set the IP, (to know the right IP, Look for your drone’s IP). Once it’s changed, connect to it. When you connect to it, you will get a notification or prompt saying there is no internet and will ask if you still want to be connected then tap “yes”. Then afterward, there will be another text box that will pop up and ask you if you want to be asked again every time you connect to that network then tap “No”.

Conclusion

Now that you know that there are numerous solutions for your problem, you can see that there are multiple solutions to the problem.  

You will always want to search for your drone product or check the instruction book for solutions if the above ones do not work for you. If everything has already been tried, then you may contact your customer service representative to guide you accurately and to finally solve your connectivity issues.