Thursday, October 1, 2009

Bayourat Rocketry Tests Realtime GPS Tracking Device


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I was researching GPS tracking when I found this inexpensive GPS tracking device. The software was free. I have been carrying it around with me testing out the coverage and accuracy. So far so good. I will be testing it in a rocket soon. I just have my doubts about the cell coverage at the field. I'll keep you all posted on the progress.

3 comments:

  1. Well, since cell phone coverage is line of sight, the higher your rocket goes the better I'd think. Though my guess is that once it gets beyond half a km up you might be overwhelmed with signals - distance to horizon is SQRT(13h) where h is meters, giving you a horizon distance of 114km. That's also a radius, so all the cell towers within that circle should be visible to your cellphone. πR^2 where R=114km covers a lot of area!

    you can also Google up cell phone dead areas. Here's one link, there are others:
    http://www.cellreception.com/deadspots/louisiana/page4.html

    Good luck!

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  2. at 1km distance to horizon is 114km. Sorry.

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  3. Thanks so much for sharing this. We have been using a Real Time GPS Tracking system at my work to monitor all of the trucks that we are sending out on the roads. It has been working great so far and hope it will in the long run.

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