[Canberrauav] Sunday Recap
Stephen Dade stephen_dade at hotmail.com 
Sun Sep 30 23:36:02 EST 2012 

Hi everyone,

We had a very busy day today - 14 hours of testing, debugging and finalising 
our equipment.

The highlights were:

We scouted out Kingaroy airport - all the tents are up (along with a massive 
power generator). We spent some time talking with the organisers - they are 
very friendly and approachable. They confirmed that we will be getting access 
to a power generator for the ground station.

We also scouted out the search area. We confirmed that the SRTM terrain model 
we've been using is 4-9m lower than the GPS height. This is consistent throughout 
the search area. This sort of discrepancy is very minor and our flight plan will work 
fine with this.

The fuel line from the main tank to header tank was blocked/broken - lucky we 
found and fixed this!

The antenna/radio issue from yesterday was solved. We put the ground station 
antenna on top of the trailer at one end of the airport and the mugin on Jack's car 
at the other end of the airport (~1.5km). We got a great signal on both the 900MHz 
and 5.8 GHz links. Based on the massive link margin we had, Tridge calculated that 
we had enough signal to retain a link throughout the search area.

We tested the full setup of our ground station. There was some issues with cable 
routing, but we got it worked out in the end. We are now using the trailer as part of 
our ground station - for shade cover and to mount out antennas onto to make them 
taller.

We met the TGIF (from HSBNE) and CompassUAV teams. TGIF let us borrow some 
of their spare radio equipment, so we now have a much better 900 MHz ground station 
antenna and a better 900 MHz radio module in the mugin.

A reporter for a local newspaper found us while we were testing our ground station 
setup (we can go from 0 to setup in 10 min!) and took our photo:  
http://southburnett.com.au/news2/2012/09/can-anyone-find-outback-joe/

The challenge starts at 7am in the morning, to I'm going to bed now :)

-Stephen

Copyright 2012 http://canberrauav.org.au/