Today with help of our IT guys, I was able to Rube-Goldberg together a similar solution as Leon.
Isavi connects to the outside world via the Inmarsat satellite network
TP-Link travel router takes that WiFi signal and outputs it on a LAN port
Ethernet cable gets feed into the Intuicom Bridge-X (need to change an internal menu to use Ethernet vs cellular data)
Bridge-X broadcasts the RTN corrections received over the internet connection to my Leica rover over 900 Mhz radio.
Lots of RF floating around 🙂
Basically when inside the coverage area of an RTN and there is zero cell phone network coverage, I can break out the satellite connection and continue, no longer will lack of cellular internet be a game changer to an alternative method.
Remains to be seen if this will be cost effective, but for certain tasks I can see it being cost effective in that you can work with an RTN regardless of cell coverage and potentially save a good bit of labor (setting aerial control over a wide area that is "off the cell grid" for instance) with that labor savings hopefully more than offsetting what Inmarset is selling airtime for!
Pretty excited about adding another tool to the box and for me is was a $30 router as the Isavi terminal was already on board the survey truck for phone and e-mail in remote areas as a safety item. We will be out just the actual air time plus the IT guys Friday afternoon (and it was a nice day at the airport).
SHG
