For a project that I want to do I'm wondering if there is a prefered method for wireless communications for the best distance/noise?
e.g., is Broadband signaling any better than baseband for wireless over about 1000m and having to transmit at a rate of about 1000bps? (not sure the actual frequency range that will be used or needed at this point though)
I'm just curious as I'm reading a book on telecommunications and they mention this(it may answer my questions later though). I'm sure there are some devices that will do this and what I was thinking for a simple test experiment is to get a chip that will do the encoding and build simple test that esentially will light up an LED across a wireless connection(and then play around with distances and frequencies to see how far I can get it).
e.g., a design might be
switch -> encoder -> amplifier -> antenna -> antenna -> decoder -> led
and then I just have to throw the switch and the led should light up. This is essentially all my application needs except it will turn on and off the led at about 1khz/s and I would need pretty good "jitter" and noise control because I'm actually measuring the time difference between the recieved signal and the expected time. i.e. I would expect the led to turn on at time t but it will actually turn on at time t + dt and theoretically dt would be related to the change in distance. Unfortunately dt is only a fraction of the speed of light and so I think it might be very hard to get good precision. (although I think I can work on getting better results once I actually learn to do the wireless and solve inherent issues with it).
Maybe there are some cheap ic's that I can buy that will do this for me?
Also I was thinking that the frequency used for transmission is important. My main issues involved are distance and precision/accuracy. I figure that to low of a frequency would have its own issues such as LF electrical noise such as lightning while higher frequencies would have fading and reflection issues. It would seem that there would be a middle ground here that I would need to use to get the best result. (although here the reflection issue might not be that big a deal since I'm looking for the first signal and can ignore the reflections as long as the die out before the next transmission. (which I guess implies I would be using baseband signaling)).
Anyways, just looking for some remarks about this. I'd like to get some stuff going to play around with to get a feel for what I will end up needing to do but don't really want to just make a "radio" using some schematic. (which is essentially what I have to do but my requirements are different) I'm kinda hoping theres a cheap chip out there that does these things so I don't have to worry about building a circuit to do it. I also don't want to end up having to buy a transmitting device that includes everthing as I need a little more control over size and cost but don't want to sacrifice to much for accuracy and precision.
Thanks, Jon