fjrcrazed

I will be flying an electric Helio with a wireless video camara on board in several large warehouses. Is there a device I can purchase that will determine if their is interference that will effect my radio or my wireless video?
Thnaks

Lynx

Not for any sane amount of money, no. They exist, but they'll cost you more than your entire heli setup.
Simply range test everything where you're going to use it.

tadawson

There are a lot of scanners out there for a couple of hundres bucks that can be programmed to monitor RC channels as well as others.

- Tim

dirtybird

My Feedback: (5)

Yes there are - but they are useless.

Mluvara

My Feedback: (10)

Not this one. - Albeit, it is a like $800, but very accurate.

http://www.aerospectra.com/brochure.pdf

Michael

smokingcrater

the scanner above only does RC frequencies though, won't tell you anything about the video part...

tadawson

Maybe useless to a moron, but anyone who is capable of telling if there is a signal on a given frequency would find them very valuable.

- Tim

Lynx

It's easy to tell if there's a singal tadawson. You could do that with just the receiver and turning off the transmitter and seeing if anything tweaks. What you CAN'T see with those inexpensive scanners is real interference that might cause problems but isn't of 'relativly' high power. The 800 dollar one is actually a spectrum analyzer which can identify interference, and even help you determine it's source. Different types of signals have fingerprints on an analyzer that can if you know what you're looking at identify the type of device that created it.

tadawson

Which would make it far from useless. Note that I did not say that a scanner was the ultimate tool, but it WILl definitely tell you if something is on your channel, be it another aircraft, or other licensed service. In this case, a spectrum analyzer is kinda like shooting mice with an elephant gun. By the time you look at all the harmonics, adjacent channels, etc. etc. etc. the day is over - no time left to fly. There has to be a "reasonable" limit to what you check . . . and I feel that a scanner will pretty much do that, in the hands of a competent user. You can program the image frequencies, etc. for your channels, and while it is not an analyzer in that it will not give you a total sweep, it WILL look at all the probable trouble spots.

- Tim

apteryx

I would think you could adapt an old R/C receiver (on the same channel you want to use) with a simple detector and listen. Even simpler, you can probably "hear" a servo PPM signal on an old receiver if it's in the 1-2ms range and just listen on your frequency. If you hear noise and your transmitter was off, you have interference. Just a quick thought, might try it.

Lynx

The only problem with that is you'd have to listen to RC signals for years to really be able to detect problems, noise is never 'loud' and the frequencies are so low (only about 620hz) That the human ear is a POOR detector of extra signals.