FPV Antenna Leans Into The Bank

If you’re doing remote controlled flight, odds are you’re also flying FPV. Or you at least have a camera on board. If you’re transmitting to the ground, you may have noticed the antenna on your plane has some weird radiation patterns; bank your plane to the left or right, and your signal gets worse. [Ant0003] over on Thingiverse has a great solution to this problem that’s small, lightweight, and will fit into just about any airframe.

[Ant]’s flying a Mini Talon with FPV, and since planes turn slower than drones, and can fly much further than multicopters, the radiation pattern of the antenna is very important. In this case, [Ant] wants to keep the antenna perpendicular to the ground. This problem was solved with a cheap 9-gram servo and a few 3D printed parts that hold an SMA connector. One end of this wire goes to the video transmitter, and the antenna is screwed into the other end.

A servo alone does not make the antenna point straight up. To do this, [Ant] needed to program his flight controller. He’s using iNav, and a few clicks of the mouse makes one servo channel do whatever the gyroscope isn’t doing. The results (video below) speak for themselves. It’s an antenna that always points straight up, which is exactly what this video transmitter needed.

from Hackaday https://ift.tt/2DTvSlo
via IFTTT