DJI’s Active Track 5.0 on Mavic 3 gains ground on Skydio

The DJI Mavic 3 Pro flagship prosumer drone shipped installed last year without the company’s tracking software (as well as a bunch of other stuff we’ve come to know and love about DJI products). Earlier this year, DJI released firmware that enabled tracking called Active Track 5.0. Naturally, we took it for some testing and compared it to the king of tracker drones, the Skydio 2.

Bromley Mountain

Our favorite ski resort, Bromley Mountain, let me take the Skydio 2 drone down the mountain last year, so I figured a good comparison would be doing that same run with the Mavic 3. On the last snowboarding day of the year, despite the end-of-day mud, I took a few runs.

Unfortunately, while the Skydio, its beacon firmly in hand, followed me down the first time without any errors, the Mavic 3 lost me on my first two tries. Fortunately, on a slightly deviated third run across the side of the mountain, it was able to stay on me. You can see that run below – after…