WiFi Card upgrade testing

I guess, if one were planning a trip to a Country that has different Tx Power or WiFi channels Laws, then I guess we wouldn't get in any really big problems...
@John hill, I think you have WiFi channel "13" available to you "Austraila, here in the USA, that's a No, go.

As to TXpower, If one had a HAM Radio operator licence"Easily obtainable" then to "test" Txpower over WiFi isn't too much of a problem. "up to 500 watts"

"Testing" is the key.

Looking forward to @BobNoxious using testing equipment. Willing to help with this subject.
Steve yes if you were a Ham you could "TEST" but in theory you cant test outside your Bandwidth Allocations, but that interesting about Channel 13 I will investigate, I presume these boards your talking about are PNP no mods necessary?
 
Im very interested to see what you find.
I had the Mikrotik cards in both Solo and Artoo. Measuring the before and after, I found that the Solo card put put out the same signal strength, and the heat generated caused total loss of link to ground (and luckily successful completely automated RTH) 3 times.
I changed the Solo card back to stock and havent had any other issues at all. Current range is 3000'+ with stock antennae and solid video, and I haven't pushed it any further.

Be warned that the MikroTik card in the Solo sits closer to the HDMI board and the heat is produced on the side facing the HDMI card and radiates into it. The Solo wifi card sits further away and the heat is produced on the other side if the card, sparing the HDMI card quite so much heat.

If the HDMI card gets too hot (sandwiched between the hot battery and hot MK wifi card) it shuts down resulting in loss of link, and hopefully RTH if you have GPS, otherwise it downwind you go.
I think most of us would be very satisfied if The solo could give us the same Wi-Fi performance as the phantom 1 2 3
I live in New York Long Island area which is a very high Wi-Fi congested area.
I've done design of electronic circuits I know if three 3DR wanted to they could upgrade the solo and controller to give us a Rf performance of the Phantom, a new wifi kit from 3dr, what do you think ?
That way nobody would lose the warranty!
Bob
 
You can sign me up for one of those Bob.
Actually, in the mean time we could probably do with a better alternative to the mikrotik cards. Everybody jumped on these but there must be better options out there.
Its not like we are using anywhere near the 800mW available, we have no control of the output power at all. So sensitivity must be the most important factor not the output power. The initial decision to use this card was misdirected, and the rest of us have followed like lemmings.
 
You can sign me up for one of those Bob.
Actually, in the mean time we could probably do with a better alternative to the mikrotik cards. Everybody jumped on these but there must be better options out there.
Its not like we are using anywhere near the 800mW available, we have no control of the output power at all. So sensitivity must be the most important factor not the output power. The initial decision to use this card was misdirected, and the rest of us have followed like lemmings.
I would be glad to run tests on these new new Wi-Fi cards with the test equipment from my electronic lab also running in my solo drone in a very high RF congested area
But better than that if the distributors that are going to sell in profit from selling these Wi-Fi cards could show us proof of performance that would be better yet, if I can do it surely they can.
Bob
 
So I installed some alfa antennas and that made a huge difference. I ordered two wifi cards but only one came in because they ran out of stock. Does anyone know if another card would work as well?

I installed the card I received into the controller.
 
So I installed some alfa antennas and that made a huge difference. I ordered two wifi cards but only one came in because they ran out of stock. Does anyone know if another card would work as well?

I installed the card I received into the controller.
Quick update on the install. Original range near my house was 400-700 feet. Alfa antennas 1200-1800 depending on direction. With wifi card in controller 2400-2800.

Taking it to the desert this weekend where stock range was 3000 ft
 
So, a few weeks back I saw somewhere that the 900MHz band was now approved for WiFi. Has anyone else heard this as well?
 
OK the weather was nice today. I took solo w/ 2 upgraded radios and FPVLR out. I made it to 2.5miles before turning around. The RSSI was still -69db and I wasn't doing the best job of aiming precisely. Battery is much more of an issue at these distances. I made it back to takeoff w/ about 25% battery. There were some nasty winds coming off the mountain.

As you can see in the shot, I was walled off by some high power transmission lines. FAA, please note the the elevation where the screenshot was taken is several hundred feet higher than takeoff altitude.
595 ft altitude? ;))))) on picture i cant did that.....
 
What's the latest recommendation on upgrading the WiFi cards? I don't care as much about distance as I do about acquiring a signal and keeping a lock. The areas that I use my drone in have a lot of WiFi networks.
 
I think you'd need one of each circular polarization on the Solo for full effect. I don't know how effective half left and half right CP on the same MIMO wifi system is vs. using a homogenous set.
The SOLO effectively has that. A linearly polarized signal is actually the sum of two oppositely polarized circular signals. That's why the FPVLR array has one antenna matched to each.[/QUOTE]

With both these antenna setups, if antennas aren't changed on the Solo to matching CP, there's a loss of up to about 3dBi,
The signal received by the LHCP antenna has phase omega*t + phi at time t where omega is the carrier frequency and phi the angle of the linearly polarized transmitted signal. The RHCP signal phase is omega*t - phi + theta where theta is 2*pi*d*sin(alpha) where d is the separation of the two antennas in wavelengths and alpha is the angle between the transmitter and the axis of the array (if pointed directly at the target alpha = 0). A MIMO system measures the phase difference between its two inputs, shifts the second signal by that amount thus putting the two into phase and sums them thus increasing signal power by 6 db. In effect this synthesizes a linear polarized beam pointed at the transmitter with matched to the transmitter antenna orientation.

Note 1: That is one strategy a MIMO can take. Another is to phase things to minimize an interferer rather than maximize the desired signal. What these cards actually do I don't know.
Note 2: While the actual antenna gain is 6 dB higher than that of a single antenna each has its own pre-amp which introduces noise and these add incoherently such that the effective improvement overall is 3 dB. But there is never any cross polarization loss.
 
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Hope this helps here is a link on the wifi card
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My question about the battery life, technically because it is a higher power consumption component the battery should drain a little faster due to basic electric principles, but how much less does it last in minutes?
 
You can get a rough idea by looking at the specs for one of the booster amps. The popular 2 W 2.4 GHz booster amp comes with a 12 W power supply from which we conclude that its efficiency is 2/12 = 16.7%. As these contain a power amp and a receiver amp there is some overhead so let's assume the power amp itself is 20 % efficient (reasonable number for a linear amplifier and it makes the math easier.) Now turning to the stock WiFi cards: they transmit about 180 mW which, with 20% efficiency means that 0.900 W of power are required to supply the amplifier alone (these cards also have overhead demand). At 15 V that's 60 mA. As the battery has 5200 mA-hr capacity this amplifier would consume (60/3)/5200 = .4% of the battery's power in a 20 minute flight. Using the same efficiency an 800 mW amplifier would be expected to require 4W of power which is, at 15V, 267 mA (about a quarter of an ampere) and would consume (267/3)/5200 = 1.7% of the battery's charge, 1.3% more than the stock card. Flight duration would thus be expected to be 1.3% less than with the stock card (19:44 rather than 20 minutes).
 
You can get a rough idea by looking at the specs for one of the booster amps. The popular 2 W 2.4 GHz booster amp comes with a 12 W power supply from which we conclude that its efficiency is 2/12 = 16.7%. As these contain a power amp and a receiver amp there is some overhead so let's assume the power amp itself is 20 % efficient (reasonable number for a linear amplifier and it makes the math easier.) Now turning to the stock WiFi cards: they transmit about 180 mW which, with 20% efficiency means that 0.900 W of power are required to supply the amplifier alone (these cards also have overhead demand). At 15 V that's 60 mA. As the battery has 5200 mA-hr capacity this amplifier would consume (60/3)/5200 = .4% of the battery's power in a 20 minute flight. Using the same efficiency an 800 mW amplifier would be expected to require 4W of power which is, at 15V, 267 mA (about a quarter of an ampere) and would consume (267/3)/5200 = 1.7% of the battery's charge, 1.3% more than the stock card. Flight duration would thus be expected to be 1.3% less than with the stock card (19:44 rather than 20 minutes).
Both cards installed for over six months & never noted a difference to make me concerned about power requirements of these cards.
Although, I would gladly donate a little more battery to increase the TXpower of both of these cards "capable to 800 Mw, but this part has eluded many, in terms of implementing the correct terms via Python.
If anyone is fluent in WiFi & Python code, then please let me know.
 
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You can get a rough idea by looking at the specs for one of the booster amps. The popular 2 W 2.4 GHz booster amp comes with a 12 W power supply from which we conclude that its efficiency is 2/12 = 16.7%. As these contain a power amp and a receiver amp there is some overhead so let's assume the power amp itself is 20 % efficient (reasonable number for a linear amplifier and it makes the math easier.) Now turning to the stock WiFi cards: they transmit about 180 mW which, with 20% efficiency means that 0.900 W of power are required to supply the amplifier alone (these cards also have overhead demand). At 15 V that's 60 mA. As the battery has 5200 mA-hr capacity this amplifier would consume (60/3)/5200 = .4% of the battery's power in a 20 minute flight. Using the same efficiency an 800 mW amplifier would be expected to require 4W of power which is, at 15V, 267 mA (about a quarter of an ampere) and would consume (267/3)/5200 = 1.7% of the battery's charge, 1.3% more than the stock card. Flight duration would thus be expected to be 1.3% less than with the stock card (19:44 rather than 20 minutes).

I'd love to know how to get the transmission powers UP to those figures of even the 180mW you mention as stock.
Installation of the MikroTiks, does not change the Tx powers, that are (sadly) measured at only 125mW controller and 90mW Solo. Need software tweaks to pump them up.
Wifi Mod complete
 
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Nos. 1 and 151 for the Mikro. The 180 number is just something I recall from discussion somewhere. Keep in min=d that these are ROM numbers and note that if the stock cards do more than 180 mW the relative detriment of the new cards will be less than the estimate above.
 
You can get a rough idea by looking at the specs for one of the booster amps. The popular 2 W 2.4 GHz booster amp comes with a 12 W power supply from which we conclude that its efficiency is 2/12 = 16.7%. As these contain a power amp and a receiver amp there is some overhead so let's assume the power amp itself is 20 % efficient (reasonable number for a linear amplifier and it makes the math easier.) Now turning to the stock WiFi cards: they transmit about 180 mW which, with 20% efficiency means that 0.900 W of power are required to supply the amplifier alone (these cards also have overhead demand). At 15 V that's 60 mA. As the battery has 5200 mA-hr capacity this amplifier would consume (60/3)/5200 = .4% of the battery's power in a 20 minute flight. Using the same efficiency an 800 mW amplifier would be expected to require 4W of power which is, at 15V, 267 mA (about a quarter of an ampere) and would consume (267/3)/5200 = 1.7% of the battery's charge, 1.3% more than the stock card. Flight duration would thus be expected to be 1.3% less than with the stock card (19:44 rather than 20 minutes).


+10 internets for you. Thank you for this!

- R
 
Did anyone ever follow up with the RF analysis on these cards, or figure out how to get it to 28/29 Dbm? I just ordered the cards and am ready to install them. Is there anything that anyone has learned post the video installation instructions that might be helpful? Will hot glue work to lock down the connections or do I need some more specific electronics silicon? Sorry for all the dumb questions, I only want to do it right...the first time :)
 

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