[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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