Antenna on a drone??

[RFI-EMI-GUY]

I always loved military terminology, "Stick, Small, Hardwood. Quantity, one"
And then you have the MRE heater instructions: "Rock or something".

We have come a lot of way, well, the Scottish of course.

 

[trentbob]

Reminds me of a news story I wrote about a cheap police chief buying old army rations that were late dated to use for prisoners due to the high cost of the McDonald's run. When we did the story we made It front page and headline was gruel and unusual punishment.

Now back on topic ... it's true that we used to use duck tape to attach copper wire to a stone and then throw it over tree limbs in the winter. I could see using a drone to drape copper wire over a much higher tree limb measuring length as close as possible to allow the Drone to come back down and land and then you could take the wire and position it anyway you want.

 

[TailGator911]

I used to shoot a random longwire shortwave antenna up into the trees with a crossbow. Worked pretty good

 

[WB9YBM]

I have a few small lightweight hand helds that do cross band repeat very well and even with limited flight time you could use that in an emergency to reach a distant repeater for help or ??

It sounds do-able; would at least make for an interesting experiment.

 

[WB9YBM]

The old Gibson Girl life boat radios had a helium balloon kit that was used to fly the wire antenna up. I've even seen kite kits for doing it.

I'm not sure what's involved in the balloon kit you mentioned, but it reminded me of similar experiments done with weather balloons bought as surplus--depending on the weight being hauled, that might be a possible upgrade to consider. To take the balloon idea even further, I once heard of one ham op going for a ride in a people-carrying type balloon and taking a hand-held with him, right down to extra battery packs (since their capacity diminishes in cold temps at altitude). All depends on how far you want to take this...

 

[Project25_MASTR]

Bearcom actually has a deployable drone based repeater (I don't know if they've actually sold one). It's a hexacopter with a tether down to the ground and integrates to an APU and repeater. The tether contains a pair of fiber strands and a coper power pair. On the drone, a small duplexer, inverted rubber duck, a Zonu RF to fiber converter (for RX) and Zonu fiber to RF convert (for TX) are installed. On the ground are another two converters which then interface directly to a repeater (Bearcom used to demo it with a VHF MTR2000). The idea is by using GPS, the tethered drone can remain airborne for the duration of an incident in a single location at a fixed altitude. It is very low power though (15 dBm IIRC).

Personally, I would've gone with either a lifting kite (in coastal areas where wind is abundant) or a tethered weather balloon to physically lift a low powered repeater (such as RF Technology's "reciter" for the Eclipse 2 or two Maxon SD-125 radios in a low power repeater configuration) and run a 48V power pair up the tether (with a simple buck converter to bump it back down to 12V at the top). Little bit more weight...but magnitudes more transmit power and a significantly lower cost.

 

[bearcatrp]

I used my musky fishing rod with 80 lb test line to get my wire high into the trees. Put a heavy sinker on the line to get a great cast. Cut the line, attach it to the wire and pulled it across. Didn’t think about using my drone. Good idea. My traxxas Aton would work great. Less than 30 minutes flying time.

 

[iMONITOR]

The Gibson Girl had a hydrogen generator in a small cannister for the balloon. I think Fair Radio used to sell those. It used chemicals to generate H. A possible solution for a prepper.

A hydrogen filled balloon, wire, and RF current might not be a good combination.

 

[mmckenna]

Little bit more weight...but magnitudes more transmit power and a significantly lower cost.

I agree. Less 'cool factor' though that departments with a lot of money seem to be attracted to.

 

[ladn]

A military term that comes to mind is... Charlie foxtrot

Trains on a parallel track! FUBAR!

 

[EdNerd]

Transmit at 100 watts and blow the drone up?
that was a joke everybody

(A) If I can get 100 watts from a handheld, would I need an external antenna??
(B) Might be good for an emergency help signal!! :8>)

 

[cg]

There are tethered drones for video, going to a low powered repeater wouldn't be much of a stretch.

Situational Awareness System for First Responders l Fotokite Sigma

Fotokite Sigma is a unique situational awareness system for Public Safety and Emergency teams. With 24h of continious live video streaming capabilities.

fotokite.com

chris

 

[GlobalNorth]

I want to see a drone with a HF log periodic.

 

[Project25_MASTR]

Here's the link to Mike Butler's (an engineer at Bearcom) whitepaper.

Fiber Based Communications Drone supports multi bands/services

We are currently in the second round of test a fiber based communications drone. By combining the fiber based DAS system used in high rise building and the fiber/power tether systems available for drones; we will be able to offer a frequency/ service agnostic system with a bandwidth of 30 MHz to 2.

www.linkedin.com

 

[Token]

Put a "parrot repeater" on the drone and get it up high.

There are some very small UHF transceivers made by a company called Friendcom that could be connected to a small low cost simplex repeater board.

The person requiring assistance could launch this and use it to relay for help from 400ft AGL.

I have done similar experiments, flying various radio related payloads on the several drones I have.

For one test I used a Yaesu FT530 on the drone, set it for crossband repeat, and flew it up to about 300 AGL. I used a Yaesu VX-5R on the the ground under it. It worked very well for the short period it was up.

Another experiment was a small SDR, scanner antenna, and a Raspberry Pi as the drone payload. The Pi was set up to be a wireless server for the SDR, so I could access the SDR from the ground. Again, I ran it up to 300+ foot. Think of it as a 300 foot tall antenna with zero feedline loss.

T!

 

[Gilly1980]

1.) how much weight can the drone carry? (A long enough run of coax can get heavy)
2.) Unless you've got really decent coax, there's going to be a point where coax losses outweigh height gain
3.) what's the antenna weight/center of gravity configuration versus drone power/stability? Too big of an antenna, or with the drone's center of gravity getting thrown off-kilter (especially with a cross-wind) could throw the drone off-balance, making it fly erratically or even crash.

Maybe a safer option would be to have the drone carry a scanner to altitude and transmit back to the ground via blue tooth.

I fly a large commercial drone at work. It has a maximum payload of approximately 6 pounds.