I'm considering how well UgCS can work with the following setup. Keep in mind this is in remote forested areas with no Cell coverage. Power is provided by portable generator.
Machines:
- Electric Helicopter with Pixhawk and Ardupilot. RFD telemetry. DragonLink Control. Not sure about video.
- Phantom 3 Pro. Lightbridge Video, Telemetry, Control.
People:
- Pilot with UgCS running on laptop to control Electric Helicopter and monitor P3P
- Another pilot with the P3P remote. Tablet running UgCS app connected to P3P by usb, and to laptop via wifi. Monitoring helicopter.
- Visual Observer with tablet running UgCS connected to telemetry through RFD radios. Not connected to Pilots because of distance from Base Network.
- Another Visual Observer with the same setup as above. VO's are used to extend the VLOS operations and are talking with pilots via handheld radios.
Other Equipment:
- High Power Router to keep Laptop and Tablet connected
Will this work? Are there further considerations I'm forgetting?
Replies
Yes. Also you can try to configure your RFD's for multi-node network.
Thanks for getting back to me. Is it reasonable to think this interference would lessen the further apart the ground radios are? They would be at least 1 km apart from each other. Good to know it will at least work in theory.
Hi Thomas,
we checked possibility to connect to one copter from two UgCS ground stations using standard 3DR radios.
This combination works but we had quite high telemetry packets loss on ground stations because of interference between ground radio modems.
May be with RFD900 things will be better but it's necessary to test this setup.