98 Minutes of Live Video over 4G: Flying a Fixed-Wing over the Alazani Valley

56-second highlight reel. The overlay is the device's own telemetry, synced to the footage.

At the end of September we took a fixed-wing up over the Alazani Valley in Kakheti, eastern Georgia: flat vineyards on one side, the forested wall of the Greater Caucasus on the other. On board was an AirCast device with an ordinary MAGTI LTE SIM, and for the whole of both flights its 1080p video and MAVLink telemetry went over 4G to QGroundControl and a browser on the ground.

The numbers

AirCast keeps a one-second flight track and a link log on the device. Everything here comes from those files, not from memory.

Flight	Armed	Furthest from home	Highest	Top speed	Battery	Video bitrate
September 26	62 min	4.7 km	787 m	115 km/h	98% → 81%	3.1-3.3 Mbps
September 27	37 min	6.3 km	777 m	119 km/h	88% → 73%	3.1-3.3 Mbps

The video bitrate barely moved. Across 98 minutes the 1080p camera stream held between 3.1 and 3.3 Mbps, out to 6.3 km and up to almost 800 m above the field.
LTE signal stayed between 76% and 100%. Rural Kakheti is not a dense network, and one SIM was enough.

From the air

Stills from the reel, with the telemetry the device logged at that second.

Low over dry fields after take-off, mountains on the horizon — September 26, climbing out: 19 m up, 197 m from home.

Wide view down the valley with a tree-lined road through the vineyards — Down the valley at 96 km/h, 58 m up and 527 m out.

Forested ridge with a band of pale cliffs under a cloudy sky — September 27, alongside the ridge near Kvareli: 137 m up, 86 km/h.

Vineyards running up to a forested ridge — Vineyards under the ridge, 206 m up and 551 m from home.

Wide valley of vineyards with a ridge on the left — Turning back over the valley at 172 m.

Steep bank with a vineyard slope filling the frame — A hard bank next to the slope, still streaming at 3.2 Mbps.

What's on screen

The footage is a screen recording of the live stream as the ground station saw it, cropped clear of the QGroundControl panels and the video call we ran alongside. It is the received 4G stream, not an SD-card recording from the aircraft, so it looks the way a remote pilot would see it. We cut a few moments where the stream stalled.

The overlay comes from the device's own flight log: altitude, ground speed, distance from home, heading, battery and the live video bitrate, lined up with the recording to within about two seconds. The map time-lapse near the end shows the plane loitering over the vineyards.

On the ground station

What the pilot saw in QGroundControl, straight from the screen recording.

QGroundControl fly view with the live camera full screen, a map inset and telemetry along the bottom — QGroundControl on September 26: the 4G feed full screen, the map bottom-left, telemetry along the bottom. 59 m up, 317 m out.

QGroundControl fly view over a forested ridge, map inset showing Kvareli — September 27 over the ridge, with Kvareli on the map: 136 m up, 609 m out, 84 km/h.

QGroundControl map with red flight path loops over vineyards and the live camera inset — The flight path on QGroundControl's map: loiters over the vineyards, live camera bottom-left.

The setup

A fixed-wing on ArduPilot, flown in FBWA with a short RTL.
A Raspberry Pi running AirCast, with an LTE modem and a 1080p RTSP camera.
A MAGTI SIM on the LTE network.
QGroundControl and a browser on the ground, both pulling straight from the device.

Want the same link on your aircraft? Start with Getting Started, or read how streaming drone video over 4G/LTE works under the hood.