Hello Guys & Girls,
I have an allotment which I am in the process of "making smart" i.e humidity, temperature and moisture sensors, this is all going well and to plan for the moment, but I had a thought it would be nice to have the data sent back to my house where it could be stored and processed, I was even thinking i could make a basic app to show the current or past data. This is not essential as I want the loop to be self contained i.e if it needs water it will auto-magicly open the valve to the rain water tank and pump water out to the plants without my interference needed.
The data collections is just a "Lets see if I can" scenario but I am quite new to the electrical building world, so I thought I would get some advice from the experts before I blow anything up. I think the easiest option would be to use a USB data dongle and a sim card to get 3/4G connectivity and send the data back that way, but where is the fun in that.
In one of my jobs I use a lot of radio equipment and I am fairly o fay with it, my thinking was I could set up a small radio transmitter (it would have to be 4W or below in power output in order to stay on the correct side of the law) and have it transmit Morse to a receiver at the house which will be hooked up to a raspberry pi to decode the Morse (Transmitting Morse means it should be able to go further on smaller power levels), My house is about 5 mile or so away from my allotment which I think with a bit of tinkering and testing I should be able to get a signal to the house using a sky-wave propagation method which means I need to use between a 3Mhz and 30Mhz frequency range (HF).
As I said I am far from an expert on any of these fields so any words of wisdom, advice, warnings or manic twitching would be appreciated. 
