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Has anyone worked on converting a portable GPS into a model recovery unit? Just thought it would be very good in visualizing and finding where our models go. Just a thought. I don’t know if this is possible. That way we could have voice turn by turn tracking?
Last year I lost my A gas in a thhick stand of tall trees. I had a line of bearing on it but was unable to find it, Two months later I found it after a heavy storm blew it down, exactly where I expected to find it..
In the meantime I went on Google maps and pulled up a satellite photo of the field and using the cursor plotted a search pattern using latitude and longitude, I then went to the field and used my portable GPS to conduct a search using the previous determined points as waypoints. I am sure I got a fairly search and did not go over much of the same ground. Unfortunately the a/c was too high in the trees to see it from the ground. Oh well, it was an interesting exercise.
I found the link under the FAI section (http://www.freeflight.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=882). It doesn’t appear to be commercially available yet. You can ask Rene Limberger or Allard van Wallene about its development.
This is the only onboard GPS tracking development I have seen so far.
I just got an Ad from Frederic Aberlenc (France) who played around with this some years ago.
Seems he got his (?) firm now making a kid-and-dog-chaser for 299EUR.look at http://www.optimaltracking.com (only in french at the moment).
I ordered one to find out how big&heavy the thing is once you take off the fancy housing of the mobile unit.
Will report!
By now I have played around with Frederic’s tracker a little bit. Range is certainly sufficient, flat on ground I got over 500m in a built-up area. Since the flight path is displayed on the handheld you can certainly get close enough.
As delivered the weight is a prohibitive 60g, but by just taking off the back of the housing you go down to 38g. This includes a hefty single cell LiPo – either use that to drive your e-timer, or use the timer’s battery (or the flight battery for F1Q). Watch out: the tracker draws 800mA during the signal phase, even if it does so only some seconds for every 40s.
Taking the unit further apart is a bit tricky, the antenna (9cm copper wire) is integral to the housing and soldered to the circuit board. And the start button / charging contacts are also very hard to take off.
The plain board will then weigh in at 14g (without battery), which is acceptable for larger models.
Frederic is prepared to sell units without housing to modelers, so the dis-assembling will not be necessary. You have to contact him directly for this, the website only offers the commercial versions.
Klaus,
thanks for the pictures. can you also post a picture of the other side of the PCB please.
thanks,
-rSince this is a thread about GPS model tracking, i though i post an update to our developments.
we have completed the hardware development phase of a new timer (FX10) which includes a GPS tracker. the total size of the timer is 27x42mm and the weight is 7g.
i will only go into detail about the GPS part of this time for now, as this is a GPS thread.
our gps antenna is 9x9mm and can be mounted on the top of a fuselage. the weight of the antenna is 0.8g.
i have included images of the timer and the antenna mounted on a F1A fuselage pod.
our GPS tracker is completely integrated into the timer, and uses the integrated 900MHz RF radio to send the GPS location back to the ground. the interval of which this happens is user selectable, but out tests have found that a 5sec update rate gives enough information.
the power consumption of the GPS and radio combined averages 50mA with a 5sec update rate.
unlike frederic’s system, ours is not available yet, but we will continue to post information here and on FB as things progress. many have asked if we would offer a standalone unit and this is something we haven’t ruled out yet.
i just wanted to post this information to show what’s technologically possible in the field of GPS tracking when size and weight are highly restricted, like in model airplanes. frederic’s system is great, but wasn’t designed for a model airplane application and also was originally developed several years ago and therefore cannot compete with more current hardware.
At the F1E worldcup in Slovakia I have observed some french and UK flyers using the Aberlenc unit with good success. Downslope there were some huge maize fields – these people came back without delay regardless of the landing position.
Obviously much easier than with just a radio tracker, even if supported by an audio beeper. (One guy with just radio was away for over 3 hours searching the maize … he was found, got supplied with water, and continued searching …).
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