Beginner ELRS hardware

Hello,

I’m currently connecting a Matek f405-WTE to my ground control station using a UDP connection. I am looking to change to a connection using ExpressLRS to increase the range of my UAV.

The board has an onboard ExpressLRS 2.4G receiver however I am unclear on the best way to connect this to the ground control station. I have seen transmitter modules which connect to handsets however I cannot see how one transmits data from the flight controller to the ground control station using ELRS. I assume there is a transmitter of some sorts which can be connected through USB but I am struggling to find one if that is the case.

Could someone please help point me in the right direction and potentially even suggest suitable modules or offer any tips.

Thanks very much.

ELRS is an RC protocol. It specifically does not support MAVLINK. You should be looking instead at telemetry radios.

Telemetry (landing page) — Copter documentation (ardupilot.org)

The ELRS project doesn’t support mavlink currently. But do a search in the GitHub repo for “Airport”. There’s a pull request that’s been merged for the next version after 3.1 I think, so probably 4.0 that will include airport. Airport reuses the ELRS hardware for a transparent link that looks perfect for mavlink. This doesn’t use the ELRS protocol like normal, it’s setup for the tx to connect to a PC with USB, not to the RC Tx. If you wanted to use this with an RC link you’d either need 2 elrs rx’s and 2 elrs tx’s or use RC over mavlink. So if you’re looking for new hardware go somewhere else for now but if you’ve got elrs hardware then within the next few months you might be able to use them for a very decent range at low cost rf link.
After re-reading your post I realized I had forgotten you said it was onboard so probably spi. If so airport won’t be of use. Just figure I’d mention it though.