Telecommand Puns

Which one is the protocol that is more often selected for sending telemetry packets and telecommand packets?

Question related specifically to 5.725 GHz - 5.875 GHz and transmission of analog video. As a ham tech, my belief is that I'm able to tx up to 1500W (never would, and no plans to do so) on those frequencies, but I have been told by someone that the FCC classifies analog video as "telecommand", and it's therefore regulated by 47 CFR § 97.215(c) and limited to 1W.

However, CFR §97.3(a)(44) defines a "telecommand" as "A one-way transmission to initiate, modify, or terminate functions of a device at a distance." I don't see how analog video is a telecommand, but I guess if you stretched and said that the transmission modifies pixles on the receiving device, it's a telecommand.

Also, 47 CFR § 97.215 relates to "An amateur station transmitting signals to control a model craft", but how would a video receiver be a "model craft"?

What do you think?

tl;dr: Can you point me in the right direction to read up on communicating with my home-brew robotics projects via radio?

I'm designing and building some vehicles (ground and air) that I'd like to be able to operate remotely. The more range I can (legally) get, the better. I understand that the amateur bands are my best bet, so I went and got my technician license, but I still know next to nothing about how to get started.

I know that my flying robot is legal (per FAA) out to line of sight range, and I'm fairly certain that I'm legal to control it (per FCC) on ham bands. What I don't know is:

• Which bands are available for data like this?
• Are there any protocols that already exist that will work well for me?
• What equipment should I be looking at, both for my mobile ground station as well as on the vehicle itself?

I haven't settled on what the onboard controller architecture is going to look like, but I will probably have an RPi operating as a main controller talking to radios/sensors as necessary. I have a little experience playing with embedded linux, but none with radio.

Goals for the remote link (in descreasing priority):

• Telemetry of vehicle vitals: battery voltage, position (APRS?), etc
• Low-level navigation controls (steering and throttle for the rover, 4 channel flight inputs for the plane)
• High-level communication with the onboard-controller (basically, I want a terminal shell for remote reconfiguration or high-level navigation commands)
• Live video (as many pixels and frames/second as I can get)

I expect it may be easiest to delegate different communications to different radios. Low-level navigation might be handled entirely separately from the data/video link using off-the-shelf RC equipment. Position data may be on a different link than video, etc.

Telemetry and position need to be REALLY reliable though, in case I need to find a lost vehicle.

I've made one antenna with a wooden frame that works great, but I'm concerned that for a smaller antenna the greater (proportionately) amount of wood would interfere with the anenna. Specifically, I'm looking at making a Moxon rectangle like this one and a helical 5.8ghz "sidearm" in the same style as my 900mhz "Death ray".