microwave dwnlink

[adi65 0]

looking for any infomation on microwave downlinksystems .Have seen it used on tv but not in the flesh! has anyone used these systems are they any good and how much?
cheers adi

[quade 4]

How much money do you have?

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[adi65 0]

have a bit to play with ...how much?

[quade 4]

Well, it all depends on how good it has to be and exactly what you want it to do.

A small system capable of providing CRW video might not be all that expensive . . . say $5000 and would probably only be effective as long as you had someone on the ground that could aim the receive antenna at the transmitter in the air. It probably wouldn't be powerful or reliable enough to work in the aircraft. This would be the low end of acceptable as far as I'm concerned.

For freefall, say for a skysurf competition, the price is going to go up quite a bit because the transmitter needs to be a bit more powerful. The camera flyer isn't going to be able to maintain any particular orientation to the earth and more importantly the receive antenna.

Global Microwave Systems makes all kinds of sport application microwave systems and I talked to them a bit at NAB a few months ago in Las Vegas. I think if you had say, $50,000 to throw around they'd be willing to talk about a lot of interesting things.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[airgord 1]

Send an email to the Wagner brothers at omniskore.com, years ago they used to have the cameraflyers wear a microwave transmitter connected to the RCA outputs (how old is this) from our cameras for live air to ground judging, it was a maintenance nightmare to keep them working, not to mention coordinating with the cameraflyers to make sure they did not turn the transmitter on too soon, or
forget and leave them on blocking the signal of the next team out.