[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
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