How to Use the Return to Home Feature When Shooting Drone Videography

by | Nov 6, 2018

When shooting drone videography and photography, you may be familiar with the number of risks your drone faces, especially if you’re not confident with your drone piloting skills yet.

One big mistake that a lot of new drone pilots make is hitting the Return-to-Home (RTH) feature when they encounter an obstacle and end up panicking. The RTH feature on drones is a great feature that allows you to call your drone to your set home coordinates.

It’s an efficient way of getting your drone back without having to go through the trouble of piloting it back. However, as we’ve mentioned, some pilots tend to panic and hit the RTH button when they face some sort of obstacle. Here is what you need to know about the RTH feature and how to use it properly.

Different types of RTH

One thing that a lot of people don’t know is that there are different types of RTH. Each one can be used in a specific scenario. We’ve explained each one below.

Low Battery RTH

The low battery RTH is pretty straightforward. Higher end drones have a feature that tracks the battery life of your drone during a flight. As soon as it detects that the battery is at a very critical level, it has the ability to make its way to the home coordinates and land itself. It’s a great safety feature, but it’s not one that you should risk having to use as much as possible.

Failsafe RTH

The failsafe RTH protects your drone in case of signal loss while you’re out shooting drone videography and photography. What’s interesting about this particular type of RTH is that it offers you a number of options to take in the event of signal loss between you and your drone.

You have the option to let it fly back home to you, or you can let it hover while you make your way to it to reestablish the connection or allow it to land on the spot.

Smart RTH

This is the RTH feature that you can fully control. Once you use the RTH feature, it will make its way back to you. It’s very important that you enable certain settings on your drone to make sure that it returns back to you safely without flying into any obstacles.

How to use the RTH feature

There are a number of features in a high-end drone that allows your drone to detect the area around it in order to avoid drone crash while you’re shooting drone videography and photography.

Landing protection allows your drone to scan the landing area to see if it’s safe to land, and if it isn’t it will automatically look for another area to land. RTH obstacle check should definitely be enabled as this will help avoid any obstacles in the way as it makes its way back to the home coordinates.