sungazer wrote:Looking Forward to seeing your working model. Also get the run down on it. I was a electronics geek and back in the day I would have been all over this. I have to say I have lost a lot of that passion. I just look on now with appreciation of those that do.
Ohhh I am very, very, very far from an electronics geeks. I'd really like to understand it a lot better, but I am far from it.
sungazer wrote:I have seen the wifi aerials that will do the 1000yrd plus at work. The Hexta system ues them a long rectangular about 25 cm they actually point at the low power device at each end the computer and the transmitter at the target. They have enough power and signal pattern out the side and back to make the distance between the target and computer.
Correcto, a panel antenna with line of sight and a car battery to power it. It's certainly possible to do this. It's just not possible for this use case, where I want to have a portable unit I could 'just drop in'.
Someone (million times better at this than me) suggested I look at a different approach, using XBees. Which would work very well. And in some way it's the most elegant and the best solution (maybe version 2 later). They are small transmitters used in industrial control systems (think activating a water pump over 10km away over RF). They are very cheap and would definitely work over 10s of km's, but it's the path of the most resistance to do with custom software setup... Also, images received would be either of low quality or transmission would be very slow, but high quality images would be retrieved directly form the transmitter after shooting, I suppose. Definitely doable, just chose not to if I can achieve this quicker with very common and cheap components.
As for the bullseye camera system, I like them. Cost is very prohibitive though, especially for their top model (which is really the only reasonable model and generally for what it is). I had a look inside the box they come in - it's a camera, router and a battery. They are all pretty large too, few minuses there. I am guessing you are paying for the software and niche market. Ignoring software, I thought, hrmmm, I can do this in my head now, so this is where I am (I will think about image editing later).