Steve, that’s a pretty fancy FPV monitor there. I just use a vertical polarized antenna on the helicopter and a circular polarized on the receiver. I can get almost 2 miles on that before it drops the signal. And since it’s analog TV the signal just gets some “snow” in it - never does really drop out 100%.
I recently went to 900MHz R9/R9M on the RC too. At two miles downrange, 75 ft AGL, that holds RSSI 50-55 dB on the RC link, with full telemetry on it besides. FrSky got a FCC cert on that 900MHz RC here in the US, but not sure how many other countries it can be used. I had DragonLink on 440 MHz before, but the R9 is a better setup since it carries the FrSky passthru on SmartPort and DragonLink doesn’t.
I was looking at that, as I got a fpvblue video system coming sometime this year and would need to move my control link away from 2.4ghz. I was initial going to use Crossfire, but would like to keep the frsky telemetry.
They do a 868mhz version too, I believe, which can be used in Europe.
I would then have to move my telemetry links to 430mhz.
I was using 430 for telemetry but now went to WiFi with the little CUAV radio. All I use the ground station for is to make settings or upload flight plans anyway, prior to the flight. Once the helicopter gets turned loose on Auto the ground station becomes a non-essential thing to have with the telemetry on the RC. Plus the RC telemetry has a bunch of stuff the ground station don’t have. The only thing the GCS has extra is the moving map display, but with FPV never look at it anyway.
Lol……sometimes, I get a little carried away with 3D CAD and 3D printing stuff! The connex FPV gear is only an interim step. Will probably move over to the Hex Herelink (just for video) once it’s no longer a beta version. For RC, I’ll move over to RFD900x at the same time.
That sounds like a great setup to have. Is the analog TV signal 2.4 or 5.8Ghz? What sort of range are you getting out of the CUAV WiFi radio?
The TV signal is on 5.8GHz, 5cm ham band. It’s all in the antennas on the 5cm band. With ham gear we can push an analog TV signal 100 miles on 1 watt. But the phased colinear antenna array on the transmitter to do it is bigger than the helicopter.
The range of the CUAV WiFi radios varies, but usually between 100-150 meters to my tablet. I tried an experiment once with a Linksys wifi router being used as a range extender with a directional patch antenna on it and I got 800 meters from it. And that was with 2.4GHz RC control, so some dropped packets on the WiFi due to the two radios having to negotiate the frequency hopping.
