I am planning on starting a project soon that requires me to be able to send GPS data over a short distance (no more than 1 mile at most). I have never done anything like this with a rpi before so any tips or tricks to point me in the right directions would be apricated. I plan on using an rpi B+ but if others are more practical I can use them to.
thanks you in advance!
The HC12 is a very inexpensive, long-ish range serial transmitter that is pretty well suited to relaying GPS data at its normal rate of around one sentence a second. I have achieved well over 800m range with it.
There are some rough notes here, and plenty more around the Web for Arduino which you can adapt. It's actually cheap enough just to buy a couple and try them out. If the range is not quite enough, you could maybe add an additional HC12 at half the distance to act as a relay/repeater controlled by a £4 Raspberry Pi Pico or Adafruit QT Py and operating on two different channels of which the HC12 has around 100 IIRC.
Failing that, you're probably looking at LoRa but that will be 5x more expensive. See Andreas Spiess on YouTube for a good grounding in that technology.
First thing to do is get the radio transmitter you plan on using working with the Pi. Because the wifi is never making it a mile. After that is working and transmitting then it is simple matter of sending the information to it to transmit, like you did for the testing of it.
The DockerPi IoT Node may meet your needs. It includes GPS, GSM and LoRa functionality. You may also find The Things Network of interest which provides a LoRa Wide Area Network including a free to use Public Community Network.
Try Pico LoRa it enable data transmission up to 5 KM through serial port.
https://shop.sb-components.co.uk/products/pico-lora-expansion-868mhz
