[TriLUG] So here is a thought

[Tadd Torborg via TriLUG]

Karl,
  The network is actually quite a bit longer than that in both geographic extent and total link length.  Our furthest extent of physical equipment right now is downtown Wendel on the east and just west of NC86 x i40 (Blackwood) on the west.  

The system we have now uses different frequencies for each link and treats each link like a simplex audio channel.  One way at a time.  Most nodes have 2 separate transceivers, some have 1, some have 3.  
To idealize the system to control a drone we’d want to have a common channel at each network node site to talk to the drone.  What to do next depends on the architecture used for the Drone.

All sites could listen for the downlink.  We could dedicated a transceiver at each site for drone ops, and then when there is a drone in flight we could have the drone send out a message on the common drone channel.  A supervisor in the network someplace would identify which stations can hear the drone, perhaps gather some critical signal strength or bit-error-rate data, and then select uplink to the drone from that site.

Or we could have the drone pick between sites to listen to and have all of the sites on the air uplinking at a time, on a list of transmit channels.   The drone could listen to a site and when it decides the bit error rate is too high, go scanning around for a better uplink to listen to?  Perhaps uplink sites could be sorted by proximity to the drone based on GPS at the drone? 

It’s logically pretty easy.  There may be some sophistication to add to the system to make it overcome any latency problems we have across the relatively crude network we have in place but I don’t see any reason why some group of people couldn’t do this.   The transceivers for the ground stations aren’t too expensive.  A separate modem (or ADC/DAC) for each site would need to be acquired, and antennas.  I’d be amused to try this. 

Once airborne, a drone should have more range than the ground stations do talking to each other, even though the drone’s antenna must necessarily be small.   Air to ground would want to be on a high frequency to keep the antennas small.  Also high frequencies are generally NOT used for site to site linking since the ground to ground communications is really hard to do at higher frequencies.  

This is a big project.  Nearly as big as building the existing ground to ground network.  It might attract some attention though so what the heck?   This would be really exciting with a fixed-wing drone and especially if the network got to be big enough to exceed other ground to drone mechanisms.  

This could also be done using an Internet fed network of ground stations.  That network already exists using APRS internet gateways but I think doing it with all ham radio (no commercial networks) would be much more challenging and more meaningful.  

   Tadd

Tadd / KA2DEW
tadd at mac.com
Raleigh NC  FM05pv

“Packet networking over ham radio": http://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html <http://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html>
Local Raleigh ham radio info: http://torborg.com/a <http://torborg.com/a>  

> On Jul 14, 2017, at 2:46 PM, karl flores via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> 
> Last month, we learned about creating a HAM based network using the
> raspberry pi and old HAM equipment and antennas. The network from my
> understanding is now 20 miles. Here is my question. What are the
> possibilities that the network could be used to control the path of an
> unmanned vehicle? Or as some people like to call drones. The drone is
> limited of course to battery life but also to distance from the controller.
> Could a HAM network be used to control the drone long distances?
> 
> anyone, anyone...
> 
> -- 
> Karl Flores
> IT Specialist
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