Hello, everybody.

I wish to set up some sort of surveillance for a certain plot of land in almost direct line of site (some houses and trees are in the way) over a distance of less than a kilometer. In a first stage some sensors should be detecting the opening of some doors and in a second stage one or more cameras should provide streaming signals.

I live in Germany and wish to do this without licensing fees, WiFi or the mobile phone network and without a permanent data link.

Instead, I would prefer a receiver to be always listening at home with the sender transmitting only on demand, when some interesting event happens or at regular intervals. In a further stage I would like to be able to prompt the sender for information.

So, in the end I would need some sort of on-demand two-way broadband communication

I heard about IoT, in general, and about and LoRa, ZigBee and some others, in particular. Any idea where to start with this?

Thank you.

 

Interesting project indeed. And every bit of it is possible, depending on your budget,how much you can spend on it.
Welcome to the AAC realm!! This project will certainly be interesting.
There are potential barriers, including rules about transmitting on different frequencies, and so you will need to beware of your local government rules and regulations., to keep things legal. Transmission using infra-red light would avoid that set of rules completely. In addition, beam of light transmissions are also much more private.
A second are of concern is the power source, because almost nothing operates without a power source. So what is used will definitely depend on the power available to operate it.
The third are of concern is your own technical abilities. We have withing the realm of this forum a lot of folks with vast experience and great expertise, and they can come up with concepts that are quite complex. So we will eventually need to know how much of it willmake sense to you.

 

Thank you very much for the overview.

I would provide power via solar modules and batteries. Let's say that I am not too financially constrained. Light sounds interesting, but I cannot see the place from home, so transmission has to be over radio waves.

I really like tinkering, but haven't done anything spectacular in this direction. For instance, I assembled a cheap signal generator and hooked it up to an old Hameg oscilloscope, enjoyed the view for a while, then let everything be. I also programmed an Arduino board to simulate a keyboard with the help of some external buttons on a vintage control panel. The controller was connected to a Windows computer with a simple video player. Pressing one of the external buttons would select a video. My colleagues used this at a fair.

I appreciate every bit of advice I can get.