Best xbee for control of autonomous drone

I build an autonomous drone and now that I’m starting long distance flight I wanted to use an xbee based controller to set up simple communication to allow me to put the drone into a recall or safety mode if need be.

Both the drone and the controller are build and work fine, however if the drone goes more than 7-10 meters away and starts changing it’s orientation the xbee’s lose contact with each other and don’t seem to reconnect again until the drone stops moving and I get close to it again.

I’m using Series 1 xbee’s with the wire antenna. In my lab when the drone is sitting on the table they communicate just fine. I thought they had a range of 300ft, but again they only seem to work at 7-10 meters.

I have a couple questions:

  1. Is there any configurations I can change in XCTU to get them working better when the drone is moving around?

  2. If I upgraded to Series 3 with a better antenna would that help?

  3. Or are xbee’s just bad at communicating with moving targets and they just aren’t the right solution? (If that’s the case, no hard feelings. The xbee’s were super easy to set up and I have no complaints.)

Thanks,
Kathy

Kathy,

This is something that would be better talked about via a Support case instead of on the chat. Please contact Support by sending an email to tech.support@digi.com

Digi Support