racecar live camera setup

[Benjiboiiiiiii]

i want to put a poe security camera on a racecar and have it live stream to the pits for a 24 hour race. my plan was to use a ubiquity nsm5 on the car and in the pits. the issue is how wide the signal range would have to be to cover the track. other teams have tried using a hotspot in the car to stream the race but have had little luck with signal dropping in parts of the track. anyone have any ideas?

[Needfuldoer]

Can you get line-of-sight to the entire track from the pit?

 

The pro solution would be a bonded cellular backpack like a LiveU, TVU, or Dejero, but they're very expensive. (Assuming there's no mesh infrastructure around the track you can take advantage of.)

[jaslion]

Honestly this more so asks for a biiiiiiiig stream buffer delay so that when the signal drops a system can keep going on like multiple minutes of buffer data.

 

Else you have to like put wifi access point every hundred meters or so and hope the stuff can roam fast enough for proper live streaming.

 

This is more so a case of mimic what live crews do during loooong range live streamed events like a Tour de France here or something. When using helis and whatnot.

 

Stream data from whatever connection available to a central point. Let that handle the data and have it buffer whilst waiting for the output of whatever source to come in fast or slow doesnt matter as long as the average is good enough.

[BiotechBen]

1 hour ago, Benjiboiiiiiii said:

i want to put a poe security camera on a racecar and have it live stream to the pits for a 24 hour race. my plan was to use a ubiquity nsm5 on the car and in the pits. the issue is how wide the signal range would have to be to cover the track. other teams have tried using a hotspot in the car to stream the race but have had little luck with signal dropping in parts of the track. anyone have any ideas?

If you have budget to spend per team:

It sounds like an Amimon Connex system might be a suitable usage case: buy once, cry once, and then have receivers on either end of the forest runs, and one at the end of pit road/inside curve of turn 1?

[LIGISTX]

My advivce would be find what cell provider has the best coverage, get an unlimited data plan from that carrier and just stream from a phone... probabaly an iphone to take advantage of the anti-vibration and smoothing of the iphone video. 

 

In general, I hate everything to do with video in my car. I keep trying to make gopro's work but they are just terrible and I am not even trying to stream lol.

 

I wonder if any of the Garmin Catalyst systems can do streaming? This is just nothing I have looked into myself. 

[spacepickle]

4 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

My advivce would be find what cell provider has the best coverage, get an unlimited data plan from that carrier and just stream from a phone... probabaly an iphone to take advantage of the anti-vibration and smoothing of the iphone video. 

 

In general, I hate everything to do with video in my car. I keep trying to make gopro's work but they are just terrible and I am not even trying to stream lol.

 

I wonder if any of the Garmin Catalyst systems can do streaming? This is just nothing I have looked into myself. 

That would be the easiest solution. You could just stream straight to YouTube from there and then feed that into OBS, for instance.

[Echothedolpin]

WiFi isn’t designed to handle constant high speed relative movement between two point very well. We just don’t notice it because WiFi isn’t really used above running speed and even then no one’s watching a 4k video stream while running. 
 

Your most over effective bet is something that runs over 4g/5g. 

[Benjiboiiiiiii]

On 4/26/2026 at 7:14 PM, spacepickle said:

That would be the easiest solution. You could just stream straight to YouTube from there and then feed that into OBS, for instance.

there is another racing team that tried that but it didnt work out for them you can go 40 ft and go from 4 bars to none. i was talking to my brother and he said we could try fpv drone video transmitter either 1.3 or 5.8 ghz analog 

[Benjiboiiiiiii]

1 hour ago, Benjiboiiiiiii said:

there is another racing team that tried that but it didnt work out for them you can go 40 ft and go from 4 bars to none. i was talking to my brother and he said we could try fpv drone video transmitter either 1.3 or 5.8 ghz analog 

i have discovered expresslrs but i have no clue how to work it yet