A long running complicated project. The scope is to have a guided aid in the OSD about where to find your flying friend. With telemetry of their trajectory. Like this:
The bar shows from left to right, where they are, how far away they are, the altitude difference, their direction of flight relative to yours and their speed.
There are more visual examples and real life tests to be found on GitHub here.
Current status
Update: A new approach that combats the flaws is released: find it here.
The working code of this project is to be found on GitHub here.
It runs on a minimOSD board, it requires (LTM) telemetry data from both planes.
The minimOSD is wired as in the following diagram:
There where a few design choices I made and why. Since I didn't want an extra radio link for the telemetry I pursued the possibility to use the audio channel to get data from the air to the ground. Since the data of two pilots is now available on the ground, right by the video, the next design choice by using a ground based OSD made sense. And I like the solution I made of making the minimOSD hardware master-slave input to differentiate.
The flaws
I should mention the project as is is working. The challenges are that a very specific hardware setup is required. For the project to work your flying friend needs to provide (LTM) telemetry data and run his video through a minimOSD. And in my case I proved them with the audio chip, so they only needed to setup LTM data in their iNav FC wired to the...Continue Reading
The bar shows from left to right, where they are, how far away they are, the altitude difference, their direction of flight relative to yours and their speed.
There are more visual examples and real life tests to be found on GitHub here.
Current status
Update: A new approach that combats the flaws is released: find it here.
The working code of this project is to be found on GitHub here.
It runs on a minimOSD board, it requires (LTM) telemetry data from both planes.
The minimOSD is wired as in the following diagram:
There where a few design choices I made and why. Since I didn't want an extra radio link for the telemetry I pursued the possibility to use the audio channel to get data from the air to the ground. Since the data of two pilots is now available on the ground, right by the video, the next design choice by using a ground based OSD made sense. And I like the solution I made of making the minimOSD hardware master-slave input to differentiate.
The flaws
I should mention the project as is is working. The challenges are that a very specific hardware setup is required. For the project to work your flying friend needs to provide (LTM) telemetry data and run his video through a minimOSD. And in my case I proved them with the audio chip, so they only needed to setup LTM data in their iNav FC wired to the...Continue Reading
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Dipole antenna's, they are my favourite go to antenna, sometimes a rubber ducky but in my opinion self-made (and tuned) antenna's really go a far way. Even unchecked a good measured self made dipole usually outperform a wrongly selected cheap rubber ducky.
However remarks about the use of balun's in dipole antenna's are found here and there. A complex topic? A difficulty to implement? I thought it's a good thing to explore!
First and third antenna have balun. The other two are a classic build dipole using a PCB to mount the active and counter-ground part's of the antenna.
For myself I made up the following rule: Use a dipole with a balun on the receiver side, use a dipole without a balun on the transmitter side. If the power of the transmitter is expected to be less then 250mW a dipole with balun could be used on the transmitter side.
But what is a balun?
I'm not the best to explain, but here is a nice write-up and where the idea and my first antenna's came from. Thanks kolins for my antenna's!
What I think it does, is limit the influence of the feeding coax cable, and in that way limit the influence of everything that is mounted beside the coax or on the airframe.
The chip I use is a ETC1-1-13, it's datasheet is to be found here. It is from the datasheet that I deduct that it's only to be used as a transmitter if the power is less then 250mW. Also it's only good for antenna's <3000MHz, so it's not to be used as a 5.8GHz antenna, I guess the chip is huge...Continue Reading
However remarks about the use of balun's in dipole antenna's are found here and there. A complex topic? A difficulty to implement? I thought it's a good thing to explore!
First and third antenna have balun. The other two are a classic build dipole using a PCB to mount the active and counter-ground part's of the antenna.
For myself I made up the following rule: Use a dipole with a balun on the receiver side, use a dipole without a balun on the transmitter side. If the power of the transmitter is expected to be less then 250mW a dipole with balun could be used on the transmitter side.
But what is a balun?
I'm not the best to explain, but here is a nice write-up and where the idea and my first antenna's came from. Thanks kolins for my antenna's!
What I think it does, is limit the influence of the feeding coax cable, and in that way limit the influence of everything that is mounted beside the coax or on the airframe.
The chip I use is a ETC1-1-13, it's datasheet is to be found here. It is from the datasheet that I deduct that it's only to be used as a transmitter if the power is less then 250mW. Also it's only good for antenna's <3000MHz, so it's not to be used as a 5.8GHz antenna, I guess the chip is huge...Continue Reading
This tracker seems to be very popular among the Spanish speaking RC pilot's. Yet in this forum there is no information to be found. Once you break the language barrier it's actually a very easy system to setup and use. And therefore I find this system needs to receiver more recognition. Lately I took the time to dig in this project and make one myself. This is a guide with tip's and tricks on how to create and use one yourself based on u360gts. And in general it should be a good guide on how to DIY a proper mechanism for any antenna tracker no mater what brain is driving it. The u360gts supports a variety of different telemetry streams like: MFD, Bare GPS, Mavlink, RVOSD, FrSky X, LTM, PitLab. There is a telemetry autodetect feature! The LTM telemetry is what I use and base this project on. An audiomodem is used to get this telemetry from the air to the ground but different telemetry providing systems could be used, one coming to mind would be the telemetry downlink openLRSng provides.
Here is a visual collection of most of the parts needed to make a 360° antenna tracker. Some are optional:
There are a few must haves and there are a few optional parts, the different approaches to the tracker are discussed and the list of the parts I used are listed after. There must be a magnetometer on the ground station, therefore a naze32 rev5 full is most easy to setup. But if you have a naze32 rev5 acro and a GPS with a HMC5883L magnetometer, that's also a working combination and the...Continue Reading
Here is a visual collection of most of the parts needed to make a 360° antenna tracker. Some are optional:
There are a few must haves and there are a few optional parts, the different approaches to the tracker are discussed and the list of the parts I used are listed after. There must be a magnetometer on the ground station, therefore a naze32 rev5 full is most easy to setup. But if you have a naze32 rev5 acro and a GPS with a HMC5883L magnetometer, that's also a working combination and the...Continue Reading
