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100KM

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

  • 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.
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