Crappy camera optics
I strapped one of those cheap 50mW 1.2GHz cameras to my plane today and went for a fly.
I was surprised at just how well the RF link worked (given that I was only using the tiny whip on the receiver) but I was tragically disappointed with the camera itself. There were only a couple of dropouts and I was flying up to 300 feet away most of the time.
Unfortunately, the footage was really low-contrast and "foggy" -- typical of a CMOS sensor with cheap plastic lens.
What is the low-cost CCD camera de jour -- clearly I'm going to have to ditch this CMOS stuff.