I am contemplating mounting a unit at a remote high location (Mindanao, Philipppines) and wondered if anyone has used a cellular 2G/3G dongle with a Pi for this purpose. I have another Pi on order so I should have an idea in a few days time. Powering could be mains or solar/battery so is not an issue.
That sounds awesome. Do you have a 2G/3G USB dongle or are you trying to pick the best one?
Hi, I have several dongles available but am awaiting another Pi arriving as I don’t wish to take the current one out of service whilst I experiment. I would be interested to know the bandwidth data requirements based on say 50,000 positions/400 aircraft as a rough estimate to data usage.
It’s not a lot. I can’t give you a precise estimate but most messages get filtered and the ones that are sent, several messages are then grouped together and compressed and sent as a single TCP packet. A site in the US near two major airports and a big class B airspace uses about two kilobits/second of upstream bandwidth, so not a lot.