[Paparazzi-devel] XBee Modem Issues

[Reto Büttner]

Hi guys,

we are experiencing some nasty issures with XBee Series 2 and S2B modems.

Using the old ZNet 2.5 firmware (1041/1241 or 1047/1247) on XBee
Series 2 modems everything is fine. We get easily over 1km range, with
a directional antenna on the ground station over 10km.

1. As Digi recommends to go to the new ZigBee (ZB) firmware we did so.
The best behaviour we got is a good connection in direct proximity (up
to 10m). When moving the aircraft further from the ground station we
experience complete link failure, link instability or drastically
reduced data rate. We tried all different settings like baud rate, PAN
ID, node identifier, target modem (pairing) and sleep timer settings.
Nothing helped. Of course this reduced range and link instability is
not acceptable. So we went back to the old ZNet 2.5 firmware.

2. We experienced problems loading old firmware on the S2B modems. We
are not quite sure if they are completely compatible with old series 2
modems. X-CTU permanently wants to upgrade to a newer firmware. X-CTU
is able to write an old firmware on a S2B modem, but cannot read it.
Therefore we are not using S2B modems anymore.

3. X-CTU could not download firmware. We had to download it maually
and unzip the firmware files by hand into the proper folders.

Has anyone made similar experience and knows how to get these nice
little modems running properly?

Cheers,
Reto