Since the release of the DJI Mavic 3 there has seen a slow but steady stream of complaints being posted by users about various aspects of the drone. While DJI have released two major firmware updates for the new model that address many of the complaints one problem that appears to be growing more than others is long acquisition times on the Mavic 3 GPS system.
Users have taken to DJI Forum and other places to complain and discuss the issues they are seeing and there are reports of people having to wait as long as 11 minutes for the GPS to lock it’s home point wasting valuable flight time.
Affected users are disappointed that they have bought a drone with longer flight times yet that’s being eaten away by having to wait so long for the GPS system to lock.
The Mavic 3 is DJIs first consumer drones to move away from using the ageing GLONASS GNNS system along side GPS and GALILEO and instead is the Chinese BeiDou system. There is no known reason the switch to BeiDou in its self should have caused the issues users are seeing as it offers similar levels of performance and converse as GLONASS however it’s apparent something is causing users to see long acquisition times.
It’s unknown at this time of this issues is related to bad hardware or software but it’s not expected that this poor performance would be intentional or expected behaviour.
DJI support have been replying to users however there has been no concrete fix or admission of the issue from DJI at this time.