Covert Drones Installs Amplified 2.5w Antenna Boosters INSIDE your remote.

[uavbooster]

Who are you and what are you talking about? LOL This has been used for many years and works perfectly on the Yuneec controller.

Ok, let me respond. If you are still reasonable. The amplifier is very heavy, and the amplifier consumes a lot of power, which should be greater than 20W. I remember that. Is this suitable for drones? NDL weighs about 10g and consumes 6W of electricity. Of course you can use an external battery for RC, but can it be installed on a drone? NDL can be installed on the drone.

 

[uavbooster]

Apparently he is very satisfied with NLDs kit. And he is from CA LOL.
Not fishy at all.

I don't care what you have with NLD, but your tone of voice to me is very provocative. I say NLD is useful. Are you not happy?
Sorry, it's not that I find it useful, but my friends also find it useful. You should find your own problem. Maybe there is a problem with your installation method. You did not cool the amplifier, it may be broken. The engine will break if it is cooled without water.

 

[Jagerbomb52]

Ok, let me respond. If you are still reasonable. The amplifier is very heavy, and the amplifier consumes a lot of power, which should be greater than 20W. I remember that. Is this suitable for drones? NDL weighs about 10g and consumes 6W of electricity. Of course you can use an external battery for RC, but can it be installed on a drone? NDL can be installed on the drone.

Am I still reasonable? LOL I guess that all depends on who you ask. ?
The set up I have in my picture is over 5 years old. Way before the set up from NDL. At the time it worked very well to boost the range on the older drones. There were thousands of them sold and distributed by Horizon Antenna and FPVLR. Horizon is no longer in business. Not sure about FPVLR.
Over time things improved. And now we have the amps so small that they are going inside controllers and drones. What a great world we live in.

 

[Apostol.]

I don't care what you have with NLD, but your tone of voice to me is very provocative. I say NLD is useful. Are you not happy?
Sorry, it's not that I find it useful, but my friends also find it useful. You should find your own problem. Maybe there is a problem with your installation method. You did not cool the amplifier, it may be broken. The engine will break if it is cooled without water.

Sure buddy whatever you say.

Am I still reasonable? LOL I guess that all depends on who you ask. ?
The set up I have in my picture is over 5 years old. Way before the set up from NDL. At the time it worked very well to boost the range on the older drones. There were thousands of them sold and distributed by Horizon Antenna and FPVLR. Horizon is no longer in business. Not sure about FPVLR.
Over time things improved. And now we have the amps so small that they are going inside controllers and drones. What a great world we live in.

You are wasting your time replying to this person.

 

[AZDave]

I never said anything about my connecting an amplifier to any existing antennas. Not sure where you got that notion from. In all cases, the existing antennas of the GL300 RC were replaced with external directional antennas which were then amplified.

I already gave you the range for the stock RC antennas. 1.5-3 miles. With a boosted external directional antenna, the range increased to over 5 miles. I didn't bother to test the range without the boosters, as I was only interested in maximum range. No modifications were made to the drones, except to add external batteries to support the increased range, and avoid suicide missions!

Agree. I said in another post just above that I misunderstood your post and missed the part about the antennas you referred to being external ... and with their own passive gain ... instead of the stock antennas.

An external receive antenna can discriminate against noise, and when you amplify that you can get an improved result.

 

[7off]

nld - 300€
superdji.com - 150$
aliexpress - xq-02a - 15$

 

[AZDave]

Just an update ... it's been 48 hours since I sent my email query to the CovertDrones "24/7" support line. No answer yet, but I'm not being critical of them for that ... they probably had to hand off the questions to a actual tech support.

 

[AZDave]

nld - 300€
superdji.com - 150$
aliexpress - xq-02a - 15$

Those aren't all equivalent units, you know ....

 

[uavbooster]

nld - 300€
superdji.com - 150$
aliexpress - xq-02a - 15$

Very bad experience, quality is equal to its price.

 

[Desert Sands]

An amplifier in the controller cannot ... repeat, cannot ... improve the signal to noise ratio of the incoming signal. The amplifier amplifies the noise and any other interference the same amount as it does the desired signal. The ONLY way an amplifier can improve the signal to noise ratio of an incoming signal is if the amplifier has a narrower bandwidth than the drone does ... and I find that difficult to believe since I'm pretty certain that DJI would have tried to optimize that. It's pretty basic.

By the way, there is no such thing as "amplified sensitivity". You just made that up. You're talking to a degreed electrical engineer with an RF background and a long time ham radio enthusiast.

Azdave is correct. Unless you had another set (of illegal amps) on the drone itself, I don't see any value for this. I only see another negative against drones and their operators. We already have enough trouble with people flying drones beyond VLOS, buzzing neighbors homes, and flying in restricted areas. The power of most drones these days is the maximum allowed by the FCC (in the US). We don't need to add illegal modifications to the litany of complaints the public has against UAS operations.

Fly safely and considerately.

Joe

 

[IggyOz]

An amplifier in the controller cannot ... repeat, cannot ... improve the signal to noise ratio of the incoming signal. The amplifier amplifies the noise and any other interference the same amount as it does the desired signal. The ONLY way an amplifier can improve the signal to noise ratio of an incoming signal is if the amplifier has a narrower bandwidth than the drone does ... and I find that difficult to believe since I'm pretty certain that DJI would have tried to optimize that. It's pretty basic.

By the way, there is no such thing as "amplified sensitivity". You just made that up. You're talking to a degreed electrical engineer with an RF background and a long time ham radio enthusiast.

G'day, actually LNA are used extensively to improve the received signal therefore the assertion that an amplifier on the receive side will provide no improvement and only increase the noise floor in not quite correct. I think some of the clarification used to try and explain RF concepts to those with less experience is muddying the waters by not taking into account the complex modulation schemes used. A single chip package these days provides and overcomes most of the "hard to design" issues we used to face in the olden days with LNA. I use them routinely for GPS and in bespoke RF systems. 73.

 

[AZDave]

G'day, actually LNA are used extensively to improve the received signal therefore the assertion that an amplifier on the receive side will provide no improvement and only increase the noise floor in not quite correct. I think some of the clarification used to try and explain RF concepts to those with less experience is muddying the waters by not taking into account the complex modulation schemes used. A single chip package these days provides and overcomes most of the "hard to design" issues we used to face in the olden days with LNA. I use them routinely for GPS and in bespoke RF systems. 73.

Go back and reread my postings above. I stated that there are only two ways for the amp to improve the range ... one is if the amp has a narrower bandwdith and the other is if it has a lower front end NF (i.e., from an LNA such as a GaAsFET or MMIC). And while modulation schemes (such as precoding) can improve range versus NOT having such precoding, a receive only amp isn't doing a thing to change whatever coding scheme DJI is already using. A modern modulation scheme buried in the noise (i.e., range limited) is still a modern modulation scheme buried in the noise.

 

[AZDave]

It has now been a week since I sent my query to the Covert Drones "24/7" support email address listed on their website. I resent the same email three days ago, and so far have received no response from them. Below is the exact text of the email I sent:

<quote>
I've been a participant in an ongoing discussion thread on MavicPilots.com regarding amplified range extenders for DJI drones. One forum member posted a reference to your new offering that claims a significant range improvement by having bidirectional amplification within the controller using only the stock antennas.

NEW** Covert Drones stock antenna built-in dual band amplifier

I'm a degreed electronics engineer with a solid RF background. I'm also a ham radio operator with good familiarity of RF signal processing, and I'm having a difficult time understanding how amplifying the received signal without some additional discrimination can help at all. You would be amplifying the desired signal as well as the unwanted noise, and if the incoming signal was low enough relative to the noise that it couldn't be decoded then it would still be so after both were amplified.

Directional antennas improve the incoming signal to noise but you aren't using that for this unit. I can think of only a couple of other ways your system could improve the incoming signal to noise ratio:

1. Your receive amplifier has a narrower bandwidth than the stock DJI receiver. This seems unlikely to me since I can't beleive that DJI wouldn't have already optimized that, range being a major selling point.

2. Your receive amplifier has a lower noise figure than the DJI input stage. This also seems unlikely to me, but I suppose it is possible since DJI may have tried to avoid the extra cost of a unit like yours.

So please clear up the confusion for us. It's obvious how amplifying the transmitted from the controller helps one side of the communication link, but how exactly does your unit do so for receive? Please be technically precise ... with solid engineering descriptions.
<unquote>

 

[Jagerbomb52]

Ya lets hope everything is fine with him and his family. Covid has shut down a lot of business. Perhaps the Admin knows something as he deals with him as a preferred vender on the Autelforum.

 

[eEridani]

Well - actually - an amplifier can improve SNR. If we assume the LNA in the product has a set SNR, but the signal being received is below the ability of the LNA to lock, an external amplifier can boost the signal of interest to above the products nominal sensitivity. It is also possible the SNR of the amplifier is lower than the SNR of the autogain circuitry in the product LNA. So the LNA can be used at a lower gain, with better SNR, and so on.

But, you pretty much need an expert engineer to work through the numbers to determine what is really happening, anything else is a Band-Aid.

ps: All that said: changing the antenna characteristics can also improve gain, hence range. A parabola, a yagi, but these also have tradeoffs. But if 10km isn't enough, I hear there are some clip-on passive reflectors out there that add measurable range.

 

[AZDave]

Well - actually - an amplifier can improve SNR. If we assume the LNA in the product has a set SNR, but the signal being received is below the ability of the LNA to lock, an external amplifier can boost the signal of interest to above the products nominal sensitivity. It is also possible the SNR of the amplifier is lower than the SNR of the autogain circuitry in the product LNA. So the LNA can be used at a lower gain, with better SNR, and so on.

But, you pretty much need an expert engineer to work through the numbers to determine what is really happening, anything else is a Band-Aid.

ps: All that said: changing the antenna characteristics can also improve gain, hence range. A parabola, a yagi, but these also have tradeoffs. But if 10km isn't enough, I hear there are some clip-on passive reflectors out there that add measurable range.

Your first point is definitely valid, but assumes a very low ambient noise level. Otherwise you'd just be amplifying the noise along with the weak signal. Not sure how often that low of an ambient noise is the case, though, especially since users of these amps extol their benefit in urban environments. But yes ... that is possible. DJI could have set the gain in the front end of their stock receiver based upon some assumption for typical ambient noise levels instead of some best case scenario since too much gain could cause A/D overload in normal cases.

Your second point is the same as my second point in several of my comments above. I just don't understand why DJI wouldn't have put the best low noise amp they could in their stock receiver since range and signal reliability are such a huge selling points. So I think this is unlikely to be the case.

 

[Interficiam Stercore]

Azdave is correct. Unless you had another set (of illegal amps) on the drone itself, I don't see any value for this. I only see another negative against drones and their operators. We already have enough trouble with people flying drones beyond VLOS, buzzing neighbors homes, and flying in restricted areas. The power of most drones these days is the maximum allowed by the FCC (in the US). We don't need to add illegal modifications to the litany of complaints the public has against UAS operations.

Fly safely and considerately.

Joe

When a society creates a legal device, someone inevitabely commits an illegal act. All things made legal become, by design, illegal. Legal drugs have been made illegal if they are used inapropriately, legal driving behaviors are made illegal if driving inapproriately, legal use of drones becomes illegal when used inappropriately, etc etc. This is the way it has been and will always will be. The more they make things "legal", the more they make things "illegal". The USA has more laws and rules and more people in prison PER CAPITA than any other country in the world. We have made rules and laws to make things legal to the point, that almost everything we do is now, illegal.

 

[ElRubio]

G'day, actually LNA are used extensively to improve the received signal therefore the assertion that an amplifier on the receive side will provide no improvement and only increase the noise floor in not quite correct. I think some of the clarification used to try and explain RF concepts to those with less experience is muddying the waters by not taking into account the complex modulation schemes used. A single chip package these days provides and overcomes most of the "hard to design" issues we used to face in the olden days with LNA. I use them routinely for GPS and in bespoke RF systems. 73.

You’re right. A preamp will increase all rf signals above the noise floor and increase dynamic range which effectively lowers the noise floor. Too much gain and the receiver can be overloaded or saturated easily though.

 

[ElRubio]

It’s been mentioned already that this mod is probably illegal. I believe the FCC limits power out at the transmitter to 1 watt. There are ERP limits as well. Does anyone have the FCC ID for this amplifier. It would have to pass Part 15 regulations. These ID’s are searchable on the FCC website and include test results, test setup, etc. Maybe selling this in kit form is way to skirt the rule.
Below are FCC docs on the Mini and controller.
OET List Exhibits Report

Drone:
OET List Exhibits Report

 

[sharkctx]

Seems they have improved over the years. I have run Sunhans amps for years, 2017 was my first install. Ran a separate battery and they would run it down pretty fast. It wasn't pretty but it did the job LOL
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Hi, how much range improvement you do you feel with that mod?