Are the settings only for the frequency of what’s sent from the ground station to the vehicle, is it for both ways - or does it depend on which setting?
For example, I assume “Altitude” and “Position” are the rates the vehicle sends this telemetry to the ground station. But “RC” is perhaps for the rate that control signals are sent from ground station to the vehicle.
For telemetry rates from the vehicle to the ground station, are there ArduPilot parameters that also control this?
What are the “units” of the rates? I’m guessing “per second” - but I’d like to know for sure.
In cases where there is inadequate bandwidth to meet the requirements set by the rates, how is telemetry prioritized?
I’m curios what “RC” is on the downlink? And if there are specific sensors included in “Sensor”?
Is there a BIN file parameter that shows the telemetry bandwidth utilization? Seems to me that if we can’t tell which messages get dropped, we might want to make sure all the messages are going through.
Is there a mechanism to control the telemetry rate of the up-link: GCS → Vehicle? I’m not sure how many things this might include, but off the top of my head I can think of three:
This post is an explainer on the telemetry datarates in ArduPilot, plus information and data on how to configure the datarate to fit in lower-bandwidth radio systems.
Thanks @egunak95 for posting a link to your explainer.
Here’s a couple of points I’d like to add:
There’s a lot of confusion about a SiK radio’s baud rate - and it’s “air rate”. The “air rate” is the bandwidth between two radios. The “baud” rate is the bandwidth between the radio and the device (aircraft flight controller or ground control computer)
The air rate needs to be faster than the baud rate. I tend to keep my baud and air rates fairly slow - but they have the capacity to be quite high.
All the discussion and tools I’ve seen (including yours) involve the bandwidth of the connection from the vehicle to the ground control computer. Most of the issues I’ve come across however are for the reverse - from the ground control computer to the vehicle. This can be RTK correction messages, or control inputs from a joystick, and perhaps other signals.
All I’ve ever figured out on how to improve the “uplink” bandwidth is to just increase the baud and air rates. But it would be nice to have more control and analysis tools.
Once again - thanks for your post with the link to your explainer!