Wild Hog Canoe Race

[l3elivE]

I am orginizer for the Wild Hog Canoe Race here in Central FL.
Welcome to WildHogCanoeRace.com

It is a grueling 15 mile race down a classic Florida stream in the middle of a swamp! So much fun. Anyway, the goal is to put GoPro's at specific points down the river, and beam audio/video live to the finish line where the spectators can view it on a large screen. Here's my difficulty. I've never done this.
After digging around on the net without finding very many answers, I came across this forum.

Although the river is 15 miles, the longest distance we would be sending the video is 6 miles. however, most of that distance is thick jungle.

So, what kind of transmitters, receivers antennas, etc would you recommend? If at all possible, I would want it to be full HD. Our budget (not including the cameras) is around 5k.

Any help would be very much appreciated, or if you could point me to the correct place to ask a question like this.

Thank you!

 

[mmckenna]

It's going to be very difficult. The amount of bandwidth to get full motion HD video limits your choices. Trying to get that signal through 6 miles of heavy foliage is going to limit it even further.
Trying to do it for under $5K is going to be nudging up against impossible.

The way the networks would do this is to have short haul microwave links from cameras on the ground to a helicopter. The helicopter would beam it back to the truck. None of this is going to happen within your budget.

Point to point radio links would work, but you would need to have the antennas above the tree canopy, and that would require towers. Unlicensed links between sites isn't impossible, and can actually be pretty inexpensive, but the towers are going to be costly.

Your best be might be to try and use cellular data from each camera to hop on the internet. Have a computer feeding a monitor back at the finish line.

Sometimes easies is cheapest, and rather than trying to build your own network, it's better to use what is already there. Getting full motion HD video out of the cameras and onto the cellular network, or whatever IP network exists in the area, is likely going to be the best option.

 

[l3elivE]

It's going to be very difficult. The amount of bandwidth to get full motion HD video limits your choices. Trying to get that signal through 6 miles of heavy foliage is going to limit it even further.
Trying to do it for under $5K is going to be nudging up against impossible.

The way the networks would do this is to have short haul microwave links from cameras on the ground to a helicopter. The helicopter would beam it back to the truck. None of this is going to happen within your budget.

Point to point radio links would work, but you would need to have the antennas above the tree canopy, and that would require towers. Unlicensed links between sites isn't impossible, and can actually be pretty inexpensive, but the towers are going to be costly.

Your best be might be to try and use cellular data from each camera to hop on the internet. Have a computer feeding a monitor back at the finish line.

Sometimes easies is cheapest, and rather than trying to build your own network, it's better to use what is already there. Getting full motion HD video out of the cameras and onto the cellular network, or whatever IP network exists in the area, is likely going to be the best option.

Building towers might be an option we could handle, how high would they need to be? Direct line of sight?
If you had towers, with good LOS, what radio's/antennas would you recommenced?

Thank you!

 

[l3elivE]

I have been looking at this some more, and I think we could handle a tower 2.13 miles away from the finish, and there will be a 6 foot crane there that we can mount the other antenna to. So what radios/antennas would you recommend?
Thank you!

 

[mmckenna]

Any sort of radio with the bandwidth to handle full motion HD video is going to need direct line of sight. Whatever height get's that for you is what you need.

The easiest solution for this is to convert to IP and use something like a Ubiquity radio. They are somewhere around $100 a pop and will give you a gigabit of bandwidth. I'm pretty sure they are in the 5.8GHz band and are license free. You do need direct line of site between radios. They will not shoot through foliage. You'll need to set up an IP network on the end, but this won't be difficult if you've got a halfway decent network nerd on your team.