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I’ve been wondering, what would be the easiest way to route telemetry and commands from APM to Internet. Using 3G modem, would provide almost unlimited range (I know there has been some discussions about this in DiyDrones forum. Here in Finland the GSM network is very covering, but due the way the cellular towers are optimized, maximum altitude where the connection works is probably less than 200 m.)

In theory, list of required hardware is not long. One just needs to receive messages from APM and encapsulate them to UDP packets and send via 3G modem and vice versa. Unfortunately handling PPP communications is too large task for simple microcontrollers. I ended up using BeagleBoard for the sake of easy development and since I had one at hand. I realize that BeagleBoard (which essentially is full computer by itself) is an overkill, but it’s not very heavy and fits easily inside Maja’s fuselage. Basically any embedded system, capable of running linux and acting as an usb host would do. Maybe in the future I figure out some additional tasks for BeagleBoard to do.

The setup works quite nice now. Unfortunately I haven't been able to do much flight testing. Weather constantly sucks this winter here in Finland. As you can see I already installed skis, but there's not even snow, even though it's almost new year.

I wrote more detailed post to my blog, with link to sources: http://antibore.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/routing-apm-communications-to-internet/