Hello folks!
I've been recently trying to establish reliable WiFi communication between ground station and multicopter's onboad PC (in my case Odroid U4). My target is to have consistent connection between 0.5 - 1 MB/s in radius of 500 meters with clear view, and perhaps 300 m with some minor obstacles on the way (like trees). I also need to have the connection at any angle to the drone, either it's directly above me or the drone some distance away from me within 500m radius (assuming that ground antenna always points towards the drone).
I've tried different combination of WiFi dongles and antennas, but nothing worked even closely for me. I mostly use Alpha modems, since they have good reviews and linux support.
Here is the modems I have:
And these are antennas:
- APA-M25 3-10 dbi
- ARS-H002 5 dbi
- ARS-NT5B 5 dbi
- APA-M04 7 dbi
- AOA-2409TS 9 dbi
I also bought a booster - APA06-1, but connecting it doesn't give any power increase, but actually it decreases the signal intensity for some reason.
I tried ALL kind of combinations antennas/modems (with different antenna's pointing directions) on ground and drone side with hardware mentioned above, but none of them gave me a proper result.
For testing I used wavemon and iperf software.
The best connection I could get was with following setup: on drone it's AWUS036NHA+ARS-H002 the antenna attached under the battery parallel to the ground; on the ground I have AWUS036ACH with APA-M25 and APA-M04 antennas pointing towards drone. At this setup I could get more or less stable connection up to 100m, but the signal consistency was highly depended on drone's heading (onboard antenna orientation to the ground station).
Does anybody managed to establish a good WiFi connection that meets my requirements? Maybe you could give some tips how to increase the range of signal?
Thank you in advance!
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