[TriEmbed] Long range digital communication (long range wifi, XBee?)

[Charles West]

Thank you guys so much.  This is a number of viable ways to solve the
problem and I think I can be much more confident in how I am going to
approach this.

Thanks again,
Charlie

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 7:13 PM, Rodney Radford <ncgadgetry at gmail.com>
wrote:

> A distance of 1km is not that far and can be easily achieved with off the
> shelf WiFi systems. I am currently working on a project that has an
> Ubiquiti M2HP radio attached as the base system mounted at the top of a
> building with an omnidirectional antenna, and the same radio with a smaller
> omnidirectional antenna mounted on the mobile unit and we can easily get
> that distance.
>
> The previous solutions are good, but to me, WiFi that just works out of
> the box is a simple solution.
>
> As for my balloon communications, I had a 2-meter radio in the ham band,
> broadcasting at about 2W and was able to get 100+ miles, but that small
> antenna was up in the air over 15-20 miles high. I also tried using WiFi
> with a parabolic dish on the ground and I was able to test that out to over
> 2 miles on the ground, but that is a directional antenna - not very good
> for  your setup.
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 3:23 PM Charles West via TriEmbed <
> triembed at triembed.org> wrote:
>
>> Hello!
>>
>> I'm in Lansdale, PA now but I was hoping I might be able to pick you
>> guy's brains.  My current big project is trying to build one or more robots
>> to deliver food/drinks on golf courses.  I'm currently trying to figure out
>> the best way to maintain continuous(ish) contact between a access
>> point/basestation at it's base of operations and 1 or more robots operating
>> on the course.
>>
>> At a minimum, I would like to have the robot report its basic status
>> (battery percent, GPS position) but it would also be great if it could
>> stream video when required to allow teleprescence steering or determination
>> of what is going on.  The robot would probably be about 1 km from the base
>> station at max.
>>
>> I'm currently considering 3 possible solutions but I'm pretty open to
>> ideas:
>>
>> 1.  Use a mobile hotspot/cell modem:
>>         For fixed $130 and monthly $20, I can get a mobile hotspot which
>> provides one gig of data per month and more data for $5/gig.  If I keep the
>> reporting really light, this could work but the communication would have to
>> be kept pretty limited.
>>
>> 2.  XBee:
>>          These modules seem to float somewhere between $25 and $60 in
>> prices, so a pair would be somewhere in the $50 to $120 range.  Sparkfun
>> had a good guide to XBee (https://www.sparkfun.com/pages/xbee_guide) but
>> they are listing almost all of their products as retired (besides old
>> series 1) and most of the stuff I read about XBee is from 2015-2016 so I am
>> not sure what the best options are anymore.  In any case, it looks like it
>> would provide a low baud rate connection over the desired range.  The main
>> problem is that it requires working through XBee and making my basestation
>> have to have special software to forward information.  I'm also not sure
>> about security and it is certainly not going to be streaming video.
>>
>> 3.  Long range Wifi:
>>         Rodney's done some work in this area before with his weather
>> balloon projects.  I don't recall off the top of my head how far he managed
>> to get but I do remember he had to use higher power than allowed without a
>> higher grade amateur radio license.  That power level would not work for a
>> commercial operation.  There are some companies that are selling solutions
>> aimed at farms (http://ayrstone.com/www/?v=7516fd43adaa) and there seem
>> to be off the shelf solutions that can get 500 ft (mostly aimed at
>> hotels).  The hotel systems seem to be in the $350 range and the farm
>> systems in the $500 or so.  The robot could use a high gain antenna, but it
>> is not clear how much it helps.  These systems have security built in and
>> potentially can stream video if the range is long enough.  Like hotspots,
>> writing software for them would also be easy.
>>
>> What do you guys think?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Charlie
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