Cool setup and best of luck with your funding! A group of us in the Bay Area got a similar setup working over cellular for a DARPA challenge last year in 2012 -

Cool setup and best of luck with your funding! A group of us in the Bay Area got a similar setup working over cellular for a DARPA challenge last year in 2012 - the military is really into this idea of blanketing battle fields LTE apparently. (http://www.uavforge.net http://www.uavforge.net - we did not make the final 10 unfortunately) What kind of frame rates are you currently getting with the beagle board? Our initial work used an ARM based board from gumstix with a TI chip for encoding h.264 but the frame rates could have been better. We tried a few other boards with varying levels of success... I can't remember if Beagle boards where among them. Are you able to talk about this "custom" video format of yours? AR drone took this approach as well but the implementation is not real fun and I think a more standard format has other advantages given the right hardware ;-)