The irony is the M100 is genuinely great hardware - the payload capacity, the SDK access, the flight time with extra batteries. But DJI's geofencing treats the entire DC metro like a no-go zone, which makes sense from their liability perspective but means the thing is basically a $7K shelf ornament unless you want to deal with LAANC authorizations for every single flight.
The larger agricultural drones are also amazingly impressive, those I've seen up close doing real work and they are so reliable it is almost boring.
I wonder what the reason is that yours behaves the way it does, that sounds like a real challenge to find out though with the closed system like that.
Drones that rely on GPS are very iffy as soon as the GPS fails, I've seen more than one inexplicable 'fly-away' happen. I've found a really neat trick to test drones that are not 'known good': just find yourself a long stretch of really light chain and tie it to the drone. As long as it behaves: no problem. But if it tries to take off by itself at some point the length of chain weighs more than the drone can handle and it will stop ascending. That way at least you have some kind of safety measure that does not immediately impact the drone in a material way as long as it is near to you.
If I can ever figure out how to repurpose some of these electronics maybe for some kind of AI robot (yes, the gimbal + camera optics are so nice, it feels like a sci fi eyeball from 2037!) I will be back in business.
Some people sell exploits to "jailbreaks DJI drone firmware but with current US admin I don't think it is prudent to do too much "off-label" usage of this kind of tech.
But seeing this geofencing post.... I just had too much experience trying to get around these restrictions to actually believe that they'd drop the geofencing, especially after a consumer drone ban.
Thank you for the chain suggestion, that would have been intelligent to do. Matter of fact, my father may have made that suggestion at the time. Alas, that was a very move fast and break things period of my life.