Ken Taylor, managing director of Australia’s Silvertone Electronics, recently notified us of a customer of his who is doing some fascinating antenna measurement and characterization from the air.
He’s doing what?
Jason Schreiber is an RF Engineer at Innovative Drone Solutions, and he just released a short paper on using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, commonly referred to as “drones”) to log RF fields and measure cell tower propagation patterns. By combining a Signal Hound USB-SA44B spectrum analyzer with a small stick-type form factor computer and mounting it to a drone, Jason is able to characterize an antenna system with greater precision and timeliness, and get away from things such as ground reflection.
Jason’s Setup for Advanced Drone-based Antenna Measurement
If you’re at all interested in characterizing antenna systems (or even if you just want to take a look at a really cool drone setup), download Jason’s paper (no registration required).
Download Jason’s Antenna Characterization Paper
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4 Comments
I am interested with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, commonly referred to as “drones”) to log RF fields and measure cell tower propagation patterns.
That’s excellent, Rodrigo. UAV technology is moving at blazing fast speeds right now, and we have worked with several companies that are using Signal Hound devices as sensors in their projects. Small RF analyzers + NUCs/Pi’s + drones are a great fit! If you don’t mind, please keep us posted on your projects 🙂
http://www.NaplesDroneSolutions.com is currently building a custom hardware and software package for signal strength mapping. We have a video of it on our blog.
That’s pretty great Andrew. I’m guessing this is the post you’re referring to: http://www.naplesdronesolutions.com/using-drones-for-radio-antenna-analytics/. Nice work for sure, and it’s a pretty hot market…we’ll be keeping an eye out for your custom solution!