Comment by Andrew Dunlop on January 9, 2010 at 1:01am

From a purely RF performance perspective it is difficult to make a direct comparison with the Digi XTend, because Digi do not provide adequate specifications (i.e receiver sensitivity at given BER and data throughput).

The fact that RFM do quote receiver sensitivity is very reassuring (-108dBm at 10-5 BER and 38.4kb/s). These numbers seem about right to me.

And the price is very appealing. Nice find.

Andrew.

Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on January 9, 2010 at 2:08am

Well best you test them then Andrew ;-) Wonder how the cost will pad out once you mount it in a case and put an antenna on it. But a good find none the less.

Moderator Comment by Morli on January 9, 2010 at 3:00am

Pretty interesting antennas choices too from RFM , good find, this site and brand needs more investingation, two things that caught my eyes immediatly are "On-board data buffering and an error-correcting air protocol , digital& analog I/Os, UfL antenna port :-( .
some comparison with competition!!? here .
Boxed models price here !!! Gary is right

Moderator Comment by Morli on January 9, 2010 at 3:01am

?

Moderator Comment by Morli on January 9, 2010 at 3:09am

Faisal ,
few things in this modem looks too good to be true :) , the developer kit for eg is expensive , however I would be interested in picking oem module pair and make custom shield later.
I picked this one at the same price , so far so good but disappointed with no on board buffer.

Comment by Pbreed on January 9, 2010 at 1:36pm

I personally tested a MaxStream Xtend to 73 Miles right after they were released...
The ground station used a 14dbi dish, and the airborne part was an x-tend with a rubber duck taped to the inside window of a cessna cardinal. The ground station was set up to loop back and pointed in a fixed direction.

I flew out the direction of the antenna beam and periodically turned 90 degrees to let the side window see the beam without the tail in the way. At 73 miles I still had 100% data with no loss at 19200. I could not go farther because it worked better than I had expected and I was out of airspace to fly into. I was on the edge of the LAX Class B

Paul

Comment by Reto on January 9, 2010 at 2:00pm

I inquired by the Swiss distributor whether this 900MHz module is allowed in EuropeSwitzerland. Probably it's the same as with the Xbee Pro 900: not for Europe :-(

Comment by OlivierD. on January 9, 2010 at 3:42pm

Great find Faisal, looks interesting an very capable. Reasonably priced too.
No need to buy the Dev kit, the manual explains how to configure it via serial commands, that's good enough for testing.

Comment by Simon Kerr on January 9, 2010 at 4:12pm

I'm hoping I can adjust its frequency bands. It's capable of 902 - 928 MHz, but in NZ I'm only allowed to use 921-929 MHz at 1W, and only 3mW for the rest of that band.

Comment by jcrubino on January 14, 2010 at 3:39am

Could this handle low to moderate res video and data?

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