Feature unlocked: use your LR/XLR radio as a repeater

LR and XLR radios used on base-rover setups require that their antennas are in line of sight (see each other), otherwise the transmission range is reduced dramatically.

One of our customers using a base-rover setup with LR radios had to transmit corrections from a base station located in a valley to a rover located on another valley. These valleys are in a mountain area with some high mountains between them, that make the transmission not possible at all since there’s almost 500m of mountain blocking it.

To solve this issue, we managed to convert one of our standard LR radios into a repeater. The repeater needs to see the base station and the rover all the time and basically receives corrections from the base station and re-broadcasts them again.

• If the rover sees the base station but not the repeater, everything is fine
• If the rover only sees the repeater but not the base station, everything is fine
• If the rover sees both the base station and the repeater, everything is fine
• If the rover does not see the base station nor the repeater, it won’t be able to receive corrections

We took the rover from the parking lot close to the base station, we climbed over the mountain pass, visited the repeater location and went down to the other valley. In the picture below you can see in green, the locations where location accuracy was <10cm, meaning corrections where received and in red the location with accuracy >10cm showing that corrections where not being received.

In the area with red points, the rover could not see neither the base station radio nor the repeater radio.

And since the day was nice and tests went great, find below some more pictures of the setup.

Notice that you can add several repeaters so you could have a base -> repeater -> repeater -> rover setup to cover even larger and weirder geographies.
If you have a scenario where a standard base-rover setup does not work, please contact us and we will be happy to help 🙂