It is when you are flying and the motors are drawing high power that the bad mag fields appear and mess things up. The mag problems that you have when trying to make a small quad don't usually affect calibration. You can still do calibration.
Three (maybe more) things generally make the calibration fail:
- Once you start, it is calibrating the whole time, not just when the progress bar is moving. This means that you must be careful not to set the quad down or walk with it into a bad mag field area while doing the calibrations. You should be outside, away from metal, in an area where you might fly it, and off the ground and never sitting on a car.
- Mag calibration works best via OpLink RF, not USB
- Having a magnet anywhere around the mag sensor (hatch hold down, lipo alarm speaker, etc) is a problem.