Sky Anchor Drone Replaces Towers with a Tether for Long-Range Network Connections

It’s widely known that the farther you need a signal to travel, the higher an antenna needs to be. It’s not uncommon to see FM radio, TV, and cellular towers everywhere you travel, and the one thing they all have in common is height, which provides increased LOS (line of sight) for better range and reception. Anyone living by mountains can attest to that notion, as most are littered with them close to civilization. That said, getting space on a hilltop or mountain for an antenna is insanely tricky, not to mention the logistics in getting a tower build on said hill/mountain costs an arm and a leg.

Those problems create challenges in several areas, so application developer Josh Starnes decided to circumvent them by designing a tethered drone that aims to beam Wi-Fi and SDR while remaining aloft indefinitely. His Sky Anchor drone eschews GPS for stationary flight in favor of a downward-facing camera that uses machine vision to keep it locked on over the target site. It also allows it to lock onto other targets, such as robots or APs, and follow their direction.

Sky Anchor is outfitted with numerous 3D-printed parts and uses a Raspberry Pi 4 and Pi camera to handle the machine vision system. The drone is tethered to a gas-powered generator to remain in stationary flight, while a Cat5 cable connects to a ground station for a data connection. The entire platform is still a work in progress, but Starnes predicts Sky Anchor will have an initial 30 to 60-meter range, and an eventual fiberoptic upgrade will enable him to add a MIMO access point.