I’ve had some time to myself with the recent birth of Ryan, so to pass the time I’ve been playing with some ideas that have been bouncing in my head. This one is to test the usable range of the WFT-E2 unit I have for the MK3. I wantes to see if it could be used for live transmission of a remote camera at the other end of a cricket field. According to the SCG web site, the goal-line to goal-line distance is 151 meters. I’ll need to comefortably stretch this distance to make this work reliably.

For my test I had the MK3 with 24-70 lens attached, set in FTP mode with auto send. This means that when ever I take a photo, it would autimatically be sent to the FTP server. I had my laptop in the car running Cerberus FTP server, and connected to a netgear wireless router running off a 12V battery. To extend the range of the router, I have an 8db Omni antenna stuck on the roof on my car. To measure the distance, I have a measuring wheel and the GPS attached to the camera to Geotag every photo (link to KMZ below).

Starting at the car, I took a photo every 10 meters and made sure it sent ok. All was well, untill 80 meters, where the first transfer failed. I manually sent the image again and it steamed through at 36Mbps. At 100 meters everything worked a charm also. I tested every 10M until 160 meters, then went to the end of the field for shits and giggles.

At the end of my test field I got to 203 meters and all was working ok.

Results : Generally everything worked ok in the test and I am happy with the range. I was testing on RAW files that were 13.6Meg, so at times when the transfer speed got to 1Mbps it was very slow. In theory this will work ok. The SCG is a very RF noist environment so it may struggle.

I have ordered a 14dB Directional antenna which should fix the reception up a bit. The WFT is the weakest link with it’s transmitter not being amazingle strong.

The only remaining problem, is that images that do not send, are not automatically retransmitted. I will need further tests to see if this is a real limitation. All images are stored on the cards so there is always later…..

Test info in the attached Google Earth KMZ file (1 Meg)…..HERE