hello everyone, for a long time I have been carrying out a project of a Rover, now I have the goal of being able to control it through a camera and a remote control at distances of approximately 5 km (the objective would be that it reach a maximum of 10k) for this task I bought myself a siyi mk15 control through the holybro page ( MK15 – Holybro ) I integrated the receiver to my robot together with a pixhawk 4, and I went to test it, although the control ensures a distance up to 15 km I only get a maximum of 400 meters with the omnidirectional antennas and 600 meters with the directional antennas that come in the kit.
Am I doing something wrong that you’re giving me so less distance? Or this kit, as I see that they use it in drones, is not suitable for land vehicles? any ideas or other system that can work for my goal of controlling the rover at that distance
I have a 2W Vtx on my rover and under the best of circumstances with almost line of site 2-3km is good range. A vehicle on the ground has a lot of handicaps. Look at an LTE option.
An HDMi camera, HDMI encoder and 4G|5G streaming to Youtube or Twitch (providing video storage) should fit in a rover, and give 1080 video quality (with audio/video delay), complemented with ELRS radio.
Have a look at uavcast it was a pay for software but has recently been open source with a very attentive developer! I have used it with great successes on my rovers
In what conditions did you achieve the 2 or 3 kms? and was it with a 5.8 Ghz transmitter? I’m thinking of moving to a lower frequency of 2.4Ghz or 900 Mhz and see if I get any improvement in distance and obstacle penetration, as well as trying circular antennas instead of linear ones, but I think maybe it’s a mistake
I had not thought of that, so that at least at this etape I would not pay for a platform, and try 4G, I am also looking at that possibility, although I would like it better without the need for a mobile network, because the costs of the plan are usually a bit high and constant. In addition, not in all areas and managed to have a 4 G signal or even a mobile network.
@rmackay9 thanks I will look the conference, lthough I do want to see if I can first achieve a system without a cellular network that achieves a good range, I also saw that some use Mech networks or repeaters to achieve more range, although I don’t know how viable it is
Transmitting radio waves close to the ground will always be range limited. Every obstacle penetrating the fresnel zone around the line of sight between the antennas will affect the range. The ground itself is such an obstacle. 2.4GHz and 900MHz are also affected by this.
Even using double the TX power will not double the range. The radiowaves loose power with the square of the distance (without disturbing the fresnel zone).
To get better range you could try to put your TX antenna as high up as possible on a mast, or use some kind of flying relay.