Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Frequency Management: Don’t Wreck Your Neighbor’s Drone”.
Fpv drone racing is growing in popularity by leaps and bounds, but with more people getting into the hobby having more racers turn up at your local meat can be a literal growing pain. Interfering with another pilot’s frequencies means complete loss of control of the craft, which can easily lead to broken parts and reckless flying, but taking time to manage your frequencies means more fun and better flying for everyone. There’S two big strategies for kind of doing frequency management for something like this first is to pre-register. So one aspect is to try to have people pre-register and identify which frequencies they intend to fly on and then there’s the other aspect of when you’re on site dealing with new people who maybe haven’t registered. So we’ve found with our group that the most important part is to focus on the field and manage it at the site.
We tried a couple different strategies today: uh. It basically takes one person to kind of coordinate the frequencies and make sure that every race is going to be clear for all the pilots. We managed to get six pilots in the air today on fpv, because we’re able to use three different frequency bands for the video transmission. We had 5.8, we had 2.4 and we had 1.3. We were able to get four pilots in the 5.8 band by spreading them out amongst the different channels as wide as as we could. We ended up with multiple radio manufacturers in that band, both uh immersion and boss. Cam, the immersion radios are a little bit more limited. They only have about seven channels, and you can only fly about three pilots in that that channel bank before you have any interference. But then we could take radios like these boss, cam radios, put them on the edges of that frequency range push that out to four or five pilots there, and then we can augment with. We have a couple pilots flying in 2.4 gigahertz, so you can get one or two pilots there and then in 1.3. We can also get about one pilot and we manage it with a whiteboard.
We have a tape system where you will put frequencies up on tape and then put people’s names on the tape and assign them to that, and you basically have to manage it. Each heat that you go because you have to make sure that everybody’s on the right channel, we had a few incidents where people would step on other people’s transmission, and basically that means you’re going to crash in most times when that happens. So the other key thing is that you always when you’re doing a smaller group and you’re, not quite as formal, you always want to call out before you turn on your transmitter.
You want to check with who’s there and who’s flying to see, if they’re, if anybody’s transmitting on that and just coordinate with your friends and anybody else who’s out there, because otherwise you have these issues where yeah you hit the dirt real fast. You .