Control an led via packet radio?

Projects Networking, Protocols, and Devices
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Hi all! Hope this is the right category. If not, please advise.

I'm tinkering with a long range rc arduino boat project and want to control it at distances of 1-10km

I hold an amateur radio license (ve3 txv) and was wondering if this would be good learning project for packet radio.

I got my license 20+ years ago and am very much out of the loop.

I have the Kenwood handheld with the built in modem (not sure the model offhand).

The idea is to start with a simple one-way signal to blink an led or something and work from there.

Is this a feasable project for a noob?

Or are there much easier ways of doing this such as LoRa or Elrs?

Thanks in advance

  • Ryan
2

There are plenty of small LoRa radio/Arduino modules on the market that will reliably give 1-10 km (line of sight) range, with examples that work out of the box. I like the Adafruit Feather radios.

1 Like
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I suggest you get a nice fire going and read the Arduino Cookbook. I expect it is cool in your area at the present time. When you have finished you will have a very good idea of what is happening.

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if using LoRa you could save yourself trouble by using a board which incorporates a microcontroller and a LoRa module, e.g. ttgo-lora32 , Adafruit Feather 32u4 LoRa, TTGO-Beam, Hiltec LoRa 32, The Things UNO, Adafruit RP2040 with RFM95, etc
this saves the problems of level shifters, jumper wires which give poor connections and intermittent faults, etc, e.g. see river level monitoring

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Feasible for LoRa, there must be lots of examples out there and ready made boards.

UHF comms such as LoRa does require line of sight, so for a range of 10km across the water the transmitter\controller would need to be about 10M above the level of the water.

In a lot of places a HAM licence will probably restrict you to sending messages to other HAMs, so using it for model remote control might not be permitted. There are some caveats about remote control of stations, but a boat does not sound like a station.

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Thanks for your reply.
LoRa definitly seems to be the way to go. As you say there are lots of examples to go from.

Further thinking, if I did use a HAM radio I would probably use a one way signal and dtmf decoder on the boat negating the need for it to be a station.

Again, LoRa seems simpler/better in almost every respect

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Just ordered.
Thanks for the suggestion.

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