Heartbeat timeout — No HEARTBEAT received within the expected interval

MAVLink systems announce themselves with a 1 Hz HEARTBEAT. Missing them means the link is down or the peer has stopped, and most ground stations declare loss after a few seconds.

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Diagnosis

When you hit this

Radio link degradation or range loss.
Baud rate mismatch on a serial link, which produces intermittent parse failures rather than a clean absence.
A saturated link where telemetry streams crowd out heartbeats.
A companion computer that stopped forwarding.

Resolution

How to fix it

Reduce stream rates
Heartbeats are small but get dropped when the link is saturated by high-rate streams. Lower SR parameters or equivalent.
Confirm baud and flow control on both ends
A mismatch shows as intermittent CRC failures, not a dead link.
Check signal strength
RADIO_STATUS reports RSSI and noise; a rising noise floor precedes heartbeat loss.

Normalization

What Forge does about it

This is a transport failure, so there is nothing for Forge to normalize: the reading never arrives. What Forge does is refuse to let the gap look like good data. The read-time dropout check flags a field that fell to zero and recovered as a communication glitch rather than a real measurement, and the stuck-sensor check fires when a value repeats for 20 consecutive readings — which is what a cached or last-known value looks like after a link drops. Forge does not retry or reconnect for you; that is your client's or your gateway's job.

Connect

Normalize MAVLink telemetry

One MCP endpoint serves every protocol adapter. 16,908 curated mappings, 366 canonical fields.

# normalize telemetry from MAVLink — and 13 other protocols

claude mcp add --transport http forge https://mcp.foundrynet.io/mcp \

--header 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_FORGE_KEY'

✓ forge connected — 32 tools available