Hi Deker,
OK on the down slant angle. As I reported earlier, the database shows that while Alan was ‘seeing’ the Ground Station reporting at 2nm, the database reports that the Ground Station was receiving him at up to 12Km for at least part of his flight. It still remains a fact that the majority of issues regarding transmission/reception range as you know come down in the end to antenna choice and placement, especially with the relatively low power we are using. Unfortunately, during recent tests, I have found considerable variation between some of the early PAW antennas, which certainly won’t help, though Alan is now using a ‘Homebrew’ 869.5 antenna mounted underneath his aircraft, albeit on 2 metres of RG174.
Alan,
FYI, just so you know, Deker makes the PAW Rohan P3i antennas for us, so also knows what he is talking about.
OK on dabbling with SoftRF - that doesn’t make you a bad person - I’m always ‘tinkering’ with something or other. The reason I asked is because older Classics sometimes display particular faults that we just don’t see on Rosettas. If you choose to run a second hand Classic, that’s perfectly fine with me, as long as it’s licence key is up to date. If it isn’t of course it certainly won’t work!
The ‘obvious’ suspect for a P3i fault would appear to be a Bridge issue, and I certainly wouldn’t rule it out - especially with an older unit, but the PAW Bridges are generally very reliable and Bridge faults are extremely rare. The more likely issue with the Classic would (as I alluded to earlier) be loss of GPS, which precludes P3i transmit and can be caused by a defective GPS dongle or a seriously overheating SDR (the black Realtek ones used on the Classic occasionally run very hot - especially as they get older, - or a faulty WiFi dongle - either of which can in a ‘perfect storm’ situation block the GPS signal, but you don’t appear to be experiencing either of these problems. My intuition (and experience) still directs me to address the antenna / coax issue first, before we start to suspect anything more complicated.
Best Regards
Peter