So the Flight Management System is the Ground Segment including the GCS then?
All your other answers make sense. Thanks Gautier.
As for our Wi-Fi setup Hector; this link is designed for in-flight transfer of still images from the plane to the ground. We use XTend radios for our autopilot telemetry. However, I've been working on support for multiple, redundant links (
http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Redundant_comms) and want to fly using this system. I'm hoping to have it working for demonstration or flight at the AUVSI SUAS competition at the end of this week. But I might not succeed. So the Wi-Fi telemetry doesn't need to be reliable. Having said that:
We use two Engenious Routers 802.11 g routers at 2.4 GHz. We've got a parabolic antenna at the ground station that someone points at the plane. We've tested with the airplane on the ground up to 3 Km with a throughput (bandwidth) of around 1 MB/s. At 6 Km, we were able to see the access point, but not connect to it reliably. In the lab, we got throughput up to around 2.5 MB/s.
During flights, we've had some loss of connection when the plane was within 500 m, but we think that this was due to the antenna pointer person not doing a good job (as in 90 degrees off). Nevertheless, we're far from considering this link reliable - we need lots more testing.
For RC we use a 2.4 GHz Spectrum DSMX transmitter. During the above range testing, we tested extensively for interference and didn't find any. At the 6 Km, the RC worked great even when the Wi-Fi was transmitting UDP packets at a full rate. The only interference we noticed was when the RC transmitter was positioned only a few meters in front of the parabolic antenna.
We've also carefully designed our antenna placement in the plane to try and make the antennas invisible to each other by making them co-linear or orthogonal.
The biggest RC interference issue we had was when we set up an access point at the ground station for other purposes. It was set to auto select a channel (and the plane's router was on a fixed frequency). But the new access point picked the exact same channel and blocked the signal. I suspect that it couldn't see the airplane's access point since it didn't have the parabolic antenna. We know to be very careful about this now.
I've got lots more details if you'd like - I wrote a whole report on this. I should probably make that publicly available somewhere. Let me know if you're interested and I'll put in the effort.
Cameron