How to really do remote control?
 

A while back I played with a FPV setup.

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a3...s/5c48ef61.jpg

Camera on a pan/tilt mount, running 4 channels so I can control camera and truck on a airplane radio.

Worked ok....

The video receiver is on a LONG cable, so it was outside stuck in a tree. I was inside, watching the feed through the TV in the living room, holding the radio in my hand....

That meant the radio signal had to go through the walls of the house to get to the truck. That just killed my range, I could only venture about 150 feet from the house.


Thats no fun. And now that I have a quad rotor, I was to revisit this idea...




Someone probably knows how to do this.......




How do I get the radio signal away from the radio? I want to send it down a 50 foot cable to an antenna I can put on the roof of the house, along with the video receiver.

Then I should get.... a mile of range if I have line of sight... I want real remote control, I want to be in a different location than my radio's signal, although tied by wire to the transmitter.

I may have found a winner....

http://store.diydrones.com/ProductDe...=WI-AMP-24-500

$50, 2.4 Ghz amplifier.... with range of 4-8 miles, holy smokes that would be cool....

Not sure how to connect to radio, or if I can use a LONG cable between the two.... hope so!

I've done a little bit of 2.4GHz amplification to increase our wifi signal at school. But the main thing I used was a powerful USB adapter, rather than an inline amplifier.
I would suggest, however, that you buy a high quality RP-SMA extension cable to go between the amplifier and the antenna. You can buy another short one to cut up and wire to your transmitter (it's coax, so strip the end and solder the signal wire where the antenna attaches on the TX and the shielding wire to the ground on the TX).

Here is a cheap extension cable:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/for-Wi-Fi-Ro...item27bb005be9

The problem is that the longer the cable is, the weaker the signal gets. I would also suggest buying a higher quality cable, like LMR400. You may have to solder your own ends on it.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/LMR400-25ft-...item4cf214462c

LMR195 would be better than that $3 cable too. Not sure how much performance difference there is between LMR400 and LMR195.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/50-ft-LMR195...item1c232a5864

Then you would want to put a good antenna on the end. You could use an omnidirectional antenna if you plan to fly in all directions. Or you could use a directional antenna if you only plan to go in one direction. I would suggest googling and building your own bi-quad or double bi-quad antenna if you want a directional one. I have built several and they seem to work well. But probably the best thing to use is a simple omnidirectional antenna like what comes on a wifi router. They are cheap on ebay.

Found this... 500mw inline amp. However it got me thinking... Does anyone know how many mw a typical rc radio is? How do I know if 500 mw is even an improvement?

http://www.goodluckbuy.com/index.php...lifier&x=0&y=0