Stan, i am extremely fortunate in that i currently have a lot of spare time. i choose to use that spare time tinkering with electronics, with the hope one day that i may use some parts of the projects i assemble. so i really cannot give you exact coordinates or surveys because i simply havent got any.
this transmitter project started when a hiker friend of mine mentioned that it may be safer if we had trackers on us that automatically relayed our location to a base camp. now as i see it, this is totaly impossible because we hike up to 30km a day and often in extremely mountanous regions, even jungle (30km flat, considerably less in jungle). thus relay station are out of the question, the hikers and the base camp are mobile, and in the next six months i will be in the Yorkshire moors, Maluti mountains in Lesotho and in the thickest jungle of Brunei.
i could just buy an Iridium phone and that would solve that issue (and i probably will), but this got my imagination going and i would like to try out some wireless comms. in my original post i enquired if anybody had experience with the aerocomm AC4868 tranceivers because they looked flexible, reliable and relatively cheap. i want to get some hands on, but i didnt want to waste money buying a lemon. perhaps my original post should have asked what devices should i buy to get experience with comms and the answer seems to be cheap 434MHz devices.
so i am not after a specific solution, there is no application, i just hope to develop comms and then maybe use it to improve other projects in the future, and if i can get 10km i will be happy. so the nature of the data: it is not "hush hush", there must be error detection; and i am most likely to test it in my back yard which has excellent LOS but the application may be anywhere- so doing a survey would be futile. implications of corruption by noise: no point in receiving the wrong information, assume that the application is not life critical.
i do appreciate your comments and if there is any info i can provide to help you, then i will be glad to do so. although, i would rather not be associated with Goon Shows.