Caltech and JPL had a 50 foot high float in the 2005 Rose Parade. Several weeks before the parade, the JPL Amateur Radio Club was asked to put a camera in the head of the float which would then be used to create a live internet streaming video(http://www.floatcam.caltech.edu/). With the efforts of several club members (notably Jay Holladay, W6EJJ), some ATV suppliers, and various supporting people, we got it together.
The basic system was a 23cm transmitter on the float, with a circularly polarized (CP) omnidirectional antenna on the float's head (we had to get special dispensation not to cover it with plant products). We sent the signal to a helical antenna on the roof of 2 North Lake, an 11 story building at Lake and Colorado. The helical has a fairly narrow beamwidth, so we aimed it down Colorado, and as the floats passed by underneath us, we rotated it (using the "armstrong rotator"). CP was used to reduce the effects of multipath in the "canyon" formed by the buildings along the street.
In our tent on the roof, we had a 23cm receiver, which was fed to a 20Watt 70cm transmitter (actually a transceiver) with an IDer putting the callsign in every 10 minutes or so. The 70cm signal was routed to a small Yagi and beamed to a 70cm receiver located at the Millikan library on campus at Cal Tech, where it was fed back to JPL via some sort of link, and then streamed using JPL's realserver.
I don't have pictures of all aspects of the operation, but here are some "hot off the press" photos of the top of 2 North Lake, where I was. They're all "clickable" to get the full sized image.
Getting ready to setup, early Saturday morning (about 530AM)
The 70cm Yagi pointed at the Millikan library (that's the tall building in
the middle distance).
The view to the west (starting end of the parade) and to the east.
The float approaches coming down Colorado Blvd. That's the UT Longhorn marching band behind the float.
Looking down at the float at the intersection of Lake and Colorado. If you look closely, you can see the "pillbox" shaped radome for the 23cm transmitter. At this point, we actually were receiving the signal reflected from a building several blocks to the south.
And, for you gearheads.. here's the equipment in the tent. Two versions of the photo, one with annotations, one without. That's Jay, W6EJJ, sitting watching our glorious color images. We also had a small black and white broadcast TV receiver to watch the parade so we could get an idea of what the sequencing was. As it happens, it took about an hour for the parade to get from the start to our location (the whole parade route is about 5.5 miles, and we were roughly in the middle).
1 Jan 2005 - Jim Lux, W6RMK