I wanted to dust off the antenna tracker that I put together last year for my 3DR Pixhawk DIY multirotors. Initially, I tried to have a ground-based Pixhawk control the antenna servos, and was unsuccessful, and so it sat in the shop for a year.
I've been using my Solo quite a bit the last few months. It works great with Mission Planner and all the capabilities that come with it. While researching how to get the antenna tracker working, I noticed that there is an alternate way to drive the servos, using a Pololu Maestro servo controller and taking pitch and pan commands directly from Mission Planner.
In this setup I'm using a 2.4GHz L-Com Spatial Diversity antenna with a published gain of 11 dBi (Model RE11DS-SM) from readymaderc.com . The ImmersionRC 5.8GHz receiver also shown, was not hooked up to anything for this project.
As you watch the video you can see I initially had some difficulty getting the antenna tracker to do what I was expecting it to do. I finally realized I neglected to tell Mission Planner where the tracker was on the map. Once I did that everything worked perfectly. I guess I was feeling a bit rushed, since I was losing daylight quickly.
You may notice a little latency in how quickly the antenna tracker responds to the aircraft location. This is not an issue with the aircraft more than a few dozen meters away from the tracker. Also you might notice that the tracker has trouble when I fly almost directly overhead. This is probably due to the location I identified on the map doesn't quite match up with where the tripod was actually placed. This is not an issue, since at close range the L-Com antenna has large side lobes, and the antenna doesn't need to be pointed directly at the aircraft.
I've been using my Solo quite a bit the last few months. It works great with Mission Planner and all the capabilities that come with it. While researching how to get the antenna tracker working, I noticed that there is an alternate way to drive the servos, using a Pololu Maestro servo controller and taking pitch and pan commands directly from Mission Planner.
In this setup I'm using a 2.4GHz L-Com Spatial Diversity antenna with a published gain of 11 dBi (Model RE11DS-SM) from readymaderc.com . The ImmersionRC 5.8GHz receiver also shown, was not hooked up to anything for this project.
As you watch the video you can see I initially had some difficulty getting the antenna tracker to do what I was expecting it to do. I finally realized I neglected to tell Mission Planner where the tracker was on the map. Once I did that everything worked perfectly. I guess I was feeling a bit rushed, since I was losing daylight quickly.
You may notice a little latency in how quickly the antenna tracker responds to the aircraft location. This is not an issue with the aircraft more than a few dozen meters away from the tracker. Also you might notice that the tracker has trouble when I fly almost directly overhead. This is probably due to the location I identified on the map doesn't quite match up with where the tripod was actually placed. This is not an issue, since at close range the L-Com antenna has large side lobes, and the antenna doesn't need to be pointed directly at the aircraft.