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Up until about two years ago I was uninterested in drones. That is, until an acquaintance gifted me a Sharper Image drone. It was small, and only had seven minutes of battery life. But wow! It was really fun to fly...for seven minute. Then it was a couple hours on the charger *(. My neighbor had a house full of boys and when I moved I gave it to them.

But the drone bug had bit.

After some research I decided to get the Karma and when I found the right combo I pulled the trigger and brought one home. I make no pretenses—it was to be a toy. But I felt like I needed some playtime in this time of isolation. So away we go!

May be looking for advice on a budget system for video composition soon.

Mike
 
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Welcome mate!

Happy flying.

Have fun.
 
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Welcome to the forum mate.
Read much in this for both the good and the bad.
Read most on the bad ones so you know what to expect and know how/why and when it happens and react to it before you have your first crash (knock on wood).
This to make you always aware to not try your luck and push the karma drone to its limits.



also. I suggest you keep your gimbal connected in the drone at all times. If you keep on disconnecting it youll experience one day that your drone no longer will recognize the connection to your gimbal.
either its the gimbal or the drone’s usb-c connection/port that has worn out and will not get proper data/power to and from each other.

also, if you dont plan on using the drone for one week then pull the battery out from the drone and disconnect the camera from the gimbal.
leave the gimbal connected to the drone at all times.
If you leave the drone battery and camera connected for long periods of time without using it, that will result in connection problems with the drone to the gimbal happens.
i believe its the current/voltage that will slowly leak into the system and mess up small capacitors and senstive electronics.

Karma will let you fly for 18 minutes. But fly only 10 minutes and come home closer to you.
at 6 minutes left you need to land because if you let her come in 3 minutes then it will result in auto return home. Never use return home function unless you have to. And certainly not in bad GPS reception.

always calibrate the compass each and every flight even if you move to a short distance. Unless yourjust changing battery.
without calibration to compass will result in flyaways.

Last, with everything connected to drone and the drone turned off, turn on JUST the camera and DISABLE GPS and WIFI So they dont interfere with the wifi connection of the drone/controller.

Dont forget to just enjoy.
 
Thanks for the great suggestions. I should mention I have two Karma's but only one is working at the moment.

As for timing the landing at end of battery life--I've experimented with (abused) the auto return feature. I've found that I can descend from altitude most quickly putting the bird into a controlled spiral (left stick at 7o'clock position and right stick at 9o'clock position, or vice versa) then I manually touchdown.

The auto land sequence produces a landing too rough for my taste so I throttle up a bit during the auto land sequence to soften the landing.

Anyway, I'm still trying to resolve the second Karma's persistent issue of not recognizing the stabilizer. The stabilizer from the inoperable Karma will activate in the operable Karma. I've exchanged the cameras, stabilizers and batteries between the two with no success in bringing the second Karma to life. I now have new batteries from GoPro which did not resolve the issue so, I'm about ready to get in touch with tech support.

By the way, I keep hearing about some procedure for synching the Karma without the stabilizer installed but no intelligible write-up can be found for that. Any one staffing the Genius Bar here?

Cheers,
Mike
 
The last sentence you posted i can atest.
Yes can turn on and do anything with karma without connectinga gimbal.

thats how i aquired my karma drone, without a gimbal/camera.
I then turned on just the drone and controller to do updates.

Then after 1 1/2 months i got a gimbal/camera set which i tried infront of the seller just to see if itd work otherwise no deal buying the set.

fortunately everthing worked. So now i have a complete used karma drone.

it even let me fly with old stabilizer firmware when it shouldnt. Karma doesnt let you fly if any of your system is out of date.

do you by chance updated everything?
I wanted to know if the old firmware, pre 2020 would let you do a gimbal calibration right from the karma controller.
I heared that before, you hade to take out the gimbal, put it in the grip to calibrate it.
 
Thank you D. A followup question: Can you fly the drone without the gimbal attached?
 
Nope cant do.
The karma is super senstive to anything that is not attached or not attached properly.
If you have problems with camera not connecting it wont let you spin the props. Same with gimbal.
Even the landing gears and its switch. If i senses that its not open or the switch is not properly working and the arms not fully open it wont let you fly.
 
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