TL;DR: What RC & Telemetry systems are you using for long range ardupilot builds?
Howdy!
Im working on a couple of quad builds (7" & 10") and am trying to wrap my head around the best options for control and telemetry for the system. I would be very interested to hear what stacks you folks have found to work well for similar builds.
- FCU's are running ardupilot.
- RC & Telemetry are currently running through RadioMaster Bandit Nano units (915MHz, US) via ELRS with Mavlink enabled.
- UART connection from the first Bandit Nano to the FCU
- USB connection from the second Bandit Nano to the laptop running Mission Planner.
ArduPilot and Mission Planner are communicating fine and I'm able to control the drone as expected and get telemetry back from it. However, I am seeing some seriously slow data rates in the radio link and want to figure out a better solution. I am pretty committed to the 900MHz band as range is one of the core design goals of these builds. Faster parameter syncing (between ardupilot & mission planner) would be nice, but my primary goal here is to ensure that Telemetry and RC are maintained as far out as possible.
ELRS is very clear in their documentation that single band 900MHz systems are very slow, but I want to explore optimizations to my system. If anyone has any general thoughts or experiences they feel like sharing, that would be helpful, but I'll also include some specific questions too.
- Is it "worthwhile" to fully separate the RC and telemetry links into their own respective hardware?
- If so, what are you using? The RFD900x (as well as RFD900ux ?) modules seem to be running pretty recent hardware and I've seen them talked about favorably in here.
- I know that ELRS uses LoRa, does anyone know if any serial-over-radio units also use LoRa?
This was far more long winded than I intended for it to be, but I appreciate y'all taking a look and hopefully weighing in. Cheers.