Competition Radio Interference Solution?

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Andy Grady

I am still curious however to find what frequency the radios run at.

The radio modems used up through last year were 900MHz (who knows, they may be different this year). Same band as 900MHz cordless telephones.

Originally Posted by Don Rotolo

It is a safety issue, plain & simple.

I won't disagree that the rule is probably in the interest of safety, but from a technical perspective interference from other robots shouldn't be a safety concern really. There's several mechanisms built in to make sure that interference from other robots doesn't inadvertently operate your robot: 1) RCs will only respond to data coming from an OI with their team number, and 2) each data packet is protected with a checksum and if that is not valid it is discarded. With these two safeguards in place it should be essentially impossible for multiple robots on the same channel to interfere with each other and mis-operate each other's robot. If this were not true then I would expect FIRST to take this one step further and confiscate each team's radio modems to guarantee no interference (like they did back in the days of the RNets).