Discussions

What if I lose my drone? GPS over 3G?

Posted by Hein du Plessis on August 19, 2011 at 4:08am

With my expected Skywalker I should be able to get around an hour's flight, so I can cruise the entire length and breadth of a farm. However, it will be way out of sight and range of an XBee.

My worry is what if it does not come back - I need to go find it. Is there any way to send a GPS signal over 3G to help me find it? Telemetry over 3G would be first prize, but apparently no-one has this working yet.

Many thanks,

Hein

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Replies

Gábor Zoltán July 10, 2012 at 6:33am

If you have a old phone like Nokia E66. Could do the same. It weights a bit more, but if you already have it. :)
Dan S September 13, 2011 at 11:02pm

This is really the ultimate solution when avaliable - http://www.delorme.com/inreach/

It weighs in at a hefty 225g though. However, you could find your drone anywhere on the globe, even way out of 3G range...

--Dan
Justin August 21, 2011 at 6:36pm

The xbee xsc modules where used in a hobby rocket and got 24km range with horizontal omni to omni

my conclusion is they are therefore good enough to beat any video system if you put the xbee telemetry receiver antenna on the same tracker as the video receiver, and it has gain.
Toby Mills August 21, 2011 at 3:54pm

you might be surprised how far Xbee can go with a high gain anternna on your ground station?

I sent mine out to 4km today with a 8km round trip.

I'm adding 1km to every flight from now on until I run out of range. I'm hoping 10km is feasible over Xbee, the max range of my airframe is around 15km (30km round trip) at 50kph / 35 minute duration.

How much further than this do you need to go?
100KM
Hein du Plessis August 21, 2011 at 5:34am
I got some feedback from other forums, the current shortlist is:
- Spark Nano 2.0 Real-Time GPS Tracker (best candidate so far)
- Tramigo T22 (No response from their support)
- Garmin GTU 10 (Subscription based service, so quite a few drawbacks)
- Cheap Android Phone (A HTC Wildfire or something similar has a myriad of free apps that allows for tracking)
Pity one has to duplicate hardware, such as a GPS.

Spark Nano 2.0 Real-Time GPS Tracker
Moderator

Hai Tran August 20, 2011 at 4:24am

My Skywalker went for test flight #3 today, I got around 15 mins on a 4S 6000MaH. I have landing gear on it and it struggled to ground on medium length grass. I had to abort take off running out of runway! I ended up hand launching it. I few circuits in 5-10kt wind, and had to keep the throttle around 75%.

When I got home I weighed it in at 2kg, i suspect this might be the cause.