DJI Mavic 3 GPS issue seems to be fixed in new 0700 firmware update

For much of 2022, Mavic 3 owners have been plagued by slow home point locks when cold starting the drone. With the recent firmware update, DJI seems to have fixed the GPS issues seen on the Mavic 3.

With just a few days left, DJI met its promise to release a firmware to fix the Mavic 3’s slow GPS acquisition within two months of the previous firmware fix. While all of us would have loved to see this issue never show up in the first place but hey, it’s fixed, and the Mavic 3 is pretty much feature complete now.

Mavic 3 on new firmware shows much quick GPS home point lock

We were able to test the firmware out today after installing and giving the Mavic 3 a few hours to be in a completely cold state. When we started the drone up with a fresh battery, it was able to connect to 11 satellites and produce a home point lock within a minute – much faster than what we could do over the last few months. We don’t blame you if you’re saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” so here is a screen recording of our test. (Please note I did this test in my backyard, which is under a Class C airspace, so I could not fly the drone.)

We confirmed that this is also happening with other Mavic 3 owners in different regions to ensure it wasn’t just us. While it wasn’t instantaneous like previous DJI drones, this is far better than the five to seven minutes we saw before. The fastest we saw on a cold start was 30 seconds!

Mavic 3 GPS fix hidden in feature-rich update

On May 31, DJI released v01.00.0700 firmware which added a huge list of new features like raw images to the Mavic 3’s 28x zoom camera – something I complained about after taking it for a spin over the weekend. It also added HLG to the primary camera. Paired with the GPS fix, these changes make the Mavic 3’s price tag much more appealing.

It’s weird that DJI would hide this significant fix in the changelogs, only mentioning “Increases Home Point refresh rate.” However, it does make sense that DJI would like to sweep this problem under the rug and move on to bigger and better things, which we hope they do. Rumors show that DJI is working on releasing the Inspire 3 and new RS3 gimbal in the coming months.