[TowerTalk] Drone based antenna measurements

[jimlux]

On 1/5/16 12:00 PM, David Robbins wrote:
> easier to put a small transmitter board with short antenna on the drone and just match the gps track with received signals sampled on the ground.
> the biggest problem is deciding how far out from the antenna makes a valid far field pattern in real conditions... it may not be too bad for vhf, but
> for most hf stuff you would need a pretty big pattern to get valid results.
>
>
what I would do is program an arduino or similar with one of those Si570 
synthesizer chips to step through the bands of interest and switch 
between multiple tx antennas.

You really do need to do all three axes in some way.
So you could transmit 1 second X, 1 second Y, 1 second Z, 1 second 
silent, and then figure it out on the ground from the recording.

A quad NAND would probably work as a transmit driver, and you could feed 
a short (1 ft) monopole.

It's not like you need a huge amount of power.

the real question is how far away do you need to be to get decent data.  
1000ft? 1 mile? both, so you can compare?