I am trying to build 2 weather stations to transmit data real time to a base.(Home) The distance is 2, and 5 miles respectively.
The communication is an issue for me. I would like to use a Data Radio for this. I am a Ham operator, however I do not know much about data transfer. My question is can I use this radio Argent Data Systems along with a RS-232 shield to communicate between the stations, and base? I am VERY new to Arduino and electronics, so any help, suggestions, ideas are greatly appreciated!
It looks like it will work.
However the data part is unclear to me from the manual. It is not clear if the data signal is modulated or you have to provide the modulation. If you use FSK then you will have to keep the data rate within audio limits, that means a top speed of 300 baud.
You might also have to put some sort of call ident on it in CW depending on your ham band regulations in your country.
Good luck
De
G8HBR
I am assuming he intends to use one of these at each end of the link, in which case you can forget about modulation entirely. This unit specifies that it contains a complete tracker 3 TNC which incorporates a 1200 baud modem (possibly like the good old TCM3105). It is gross overkill (and somewhat over-expense, since APRS kits can be constructed for a lot less, including the radio) as the TNC itself already contains plenty of computing power.
Basically, once set up (including ident) it will simply provide a data link tunnelling whatever data you feed in one RS232, out the other. It should be hackable in one way or another to perform considerable further processing on the data.