Options with Missing Air Unit

I lost my HereLink air unit. I know that I can purchase a replacement for it, but the lowest price I can find for one is $450 for just the air unit itself. Adding the necessary two antennas brings the price up to $510. That seems like a really high price to me and I am having trouble justifying the expense of it. It almost seems like the better value is to purchase a completely new HereLink kit. Is there any chance that air unit replacements will be more reasonably priced in the near future?

If not, is there any other way I can use my perfectly good ground unit? Can the ground unit possibly communicate with another reciever type, like FrSky with some modifications? Is using an old 3DR Solo with it perhaps an option using Solex on the ground unit?

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Herelink ground and air units are developed to work together and there is no plan at the moment to make it working with a third party device.
The price can seems to be high if you compare to a traditional RC receiver, but air unit is not a basic RC receiver. It is a high tech and powerful device that is more a companion computer than a simple receiver.

OK, thanks for your reply. In no way am I disputing the functionality of the overall system- it’s impressive and it works well. With your perspective in mind, the majority of the value in the HereLink is in the air unit, not the controller. Maybe I need to adjust my way of thinking about it and just trash the controller since it’s of no use by itself. It’s just a pity that the expensive part is the one most likely to get lost or damaged. With that being the case, its unlikely that the Herelink will ever achieve mainstream adoption. But maybe that’s not the development team’s intent for it.

It’s also worth mentioning that before I lost my air unit, I was wanting another one anyway for use on another drone. Using one controller with many drones/receivers is a common and reasonable use case in the UAV community. In the case of HereLink, that option seems to not be supported in an affordable way. That limitation is going to impair large-scale adoption of the system, regardless of its superiority.

This kind of little functionalities will come updates after updates. Being able to pair different air unit with one controller, being able to connect 2 controllers (dual operators) to the same air units, and much more are on the way… The Cubepilot team is working hard on Herelink software at the moment, so do not trash your remote because every update to come will add value in it :wink:

Thanks, Julien. I appreciate the encouragement to stick with it. I’ll do that. I am looking forward to the updates you mention.