[aprssig] FW: Animal tracking using GPS+UHF

[scott at opentrac.org]

I think the guy is focusing too much on the 'easy' parts... you can put
together the digipeaters and base station with off-the-shelf hardware pretty
easily.  It's the part that goes on the 'roos that's going to be hard.  You
need a package for the whole thing that'll hold the radio, gps, tracker, and
batteries, in a way that the animal will tolerate, while meeting the antenna
requirements of the radio and GPS, and withstanding the operating
environment.

A VX-2, GPS board, patch antenna, and maybe 4 AA's wouldn't be terribly
heavy, but I don't know what a kangaroo will put up with on a collar, or
what sort of antenna is safe to use.  Does anyone have a UHF OEM TX board
that'd be suitable?  I know there are more commercial options for UHF than
VHF, anyway.  If you only need a fix every hour or so, I think the above
setup would last a reasonably long time.

Scott
N1VG

> -----Original Message-----
> From: aprssig-bounces at lists.tapr.org 
> [mailto:aprssig-bounces at lists.tapr.org] On Behalf Of Curt, WE7U
> Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 2:55 PM
> To: TAPR APRS Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [aprssig] FW: Animal tracking using GPS+UHF
> 
> On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, Claude Head III wrote:
> 
> > You might try contacting Gerry Creager, N5JXS. A  few years ago he
> > was working on a very similar project near College  Station, TX,
> > USA. He called it his "Cows In Space" project! Good luck!
> 
> There was also a project in Starkey Oregon with a permanent
> fenced-in area containing both summer and winter range for Elk.
> They were tracking them real-time/all the time via computer.
> 
> --
> Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
> "Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
> "Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
> "The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"
> 
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