This is also commonly used on Model Planes flying "First Person View". See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_AnqOFAs3Q for an example.
Mystery signal from a helicopter
61–70 of 83 posts
Re: Mystery signal from a helicopter
#62We operate news helicopters at TV stations around the US and they all use a similar system. Basically the right channel of audio is typically the microphone from the pilot or reporter and the left channel is the audio feed transmitting what is basically modem data back with the GPS coordinates of the helicopter and some other data. This data is used at the antenna site to track the helicopter and point the antenna in…
How do you ensure that the receiver on the tower always has LOS to the mobile unit? I can't imagine its on a track to have full 360 degrees of motion around the tower.
Re: Mystery signal from a helicopter
#63Re: Mystery signal from a helicopter
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a certain commitment to Germany over Christmas.
It started the day after Christmas, though I did travel on second Christmas day. Totally worth it in my opinion. This was my first year and I can say that an extra day of that experience is always worth it. Also WiFi totally rocked on day -1, but if you want that I guess you could also go wired any other day (symmetric gigabit and the best abuse policy in the world yay!). But of course you can also travel on the day…
That and Hamburg is a beautiful town.
Re: Mystery signal from a helicopter
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've probably already seen it, but in case you haven't: her talk at 30C3 was excellent and is worth a watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-2k6TMPMRo
Been there, was cool indeed! If you aren't planning to already, you should come to the 31c3 :)
Having become hooked on watching the feeds over Christmas I actually have been thinking about going to the next one.
Re: Mystery signal from a helicopter
#66Wow. People on HN do a lot of cool things but that really blew me away. It all sounded so casual too. This is real Hacker News.
If I'd seen this recreated in an episode of CSI, I would have thought "Bullshit."
Yup, I guess there is little overlap between the CS community and electronics community.
Re: Mystery signal from a helicopter
#67We operate news helicopters at TV stations around the US and they all use a similar system. Basically the right channel of audio is typically the microphone from the pilot or reporter and the left channel is the audio feed transmitting what is basically modem data back with the GPS coordinates of the helicopter and some other data. This data is used at the antenna site to track the helicopter and point the antenna in…
How do you ensure that the receiver on the tower always has LOS to the mobile unit? I can't imagine its on a track to have full 360 degrees of motion around the tower.
Say you have the receiver on the top of a downtown building or a tower and you are transmitting from 1500', there's not too much that can get in the LOS. Receive systems can either be a single antenna, a series of antennas, or (like in the link above) a dish inside a radome - the dish generally can rotate the full 360 since the cable slips through the middle.
Re: Mystery signal from a helicopter
#68The Kansas City Police helicopters are also equipped with 3 of our Augmented Reality mapping Systems:
http://www.churchillnavigation.com/media/videos/40-san-juan-...
Re: Mystery signal from a helicopter
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I'd seen this recreated in an episode of CSI, I would have thought "Bullshit."
Yup, I guess there is little overlap between the CS community and electronics community.
Also, surprisingly, after being exposed to things like this over and over again, people in CS community still underestimate the capabilities of technology.
Re: Mystery signal from a helicopter
#70I love this: Several people in the restaurant were waiting for orders with their similar devices, which suggested to me this could be a pager system of some sort. Turning the receiver over, we see stickers with interesting information, including a UHF carrier frequency. For this kind of situations I often carry my RTL2832U-based television receiver dongle with me (the so-called rtl-sdr). I knew I was forgetting somet…
I've seen similar devices in a pizza joint. Does anyone know why they are so big and ugly?