[Canberrauav] Saturday Recap
Stephen Dade stephen_dade at hotmail.com 
Sat Sep 29 22:01:05 EST 2012 

Hi everyone,

Today was spent checking all of our equipment and performing radio range tests.

The good news is that all of our equipment has survived the trip and each part has 
been confirmed as working. We even got the Mugin's engine started. We did end up 
leaving 1 piece of equipment in Canberra - the "poking stick" used to pull the servo 
wires through the tail booms. Fortunately we had plenty of spare materials in Jack's 
car to make up another one.

There were a few minor bugs in the failsafe module that were fixed too. It was noted 
that the failsafe module hasn't been fully tested in "OBC Mode", so we spent some 
time testing the module.

We spent the afternoon doing some radio range tests around the airport and search 
area. The results were very poor - we were only *just* able to get a link of the 900 MHz 
radio at 5km range and no link whatsoever on the 5.8 GHz radio. After moving to within 
line of sight (~3km) we got a solid 900MHz link and no 5.8GHz link.

There may be a few reasons for this:
-Ground clutter obscuring the signal, since both stations were on the ground. Whereas 
in reality one station will be 90m in the air
-Damage to the antennas
-Noise from someone else nearby using the same frequencies

Sunday's plan is:

More radio range tests!  We will place the Mugin on a nearby hill at 90m to simulate it 
flying around the search area. The ground station radios will be placed 5km away. This 
will negate any ground clutter effects.

The radio mast will be placed on top of the trailer (~4m total antenna height) to increase 
the signal quality.

We will perform some reconnaissance of the search area - looking for ground colour, 
altitude (vs our srtm model) and anything that might trip up our image recognition.

We will go through ground station procedures and simulations in the evening, once Matt 
and Micheal are in town.

Thanks

Stephen 

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