Rocket Recovery Tracking

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Hey All

I had a great opportunity to use the Kraken to find rockets in the bush last week. The event was a Launch Canada Rocketry competition for university students. Each team was required to have telemetry but with high flights and some with the main parachutes coming out at apogee, there were long-distance recoveries. GPS telemetry would not show the final resting position due to trees. Once on the ground, some of the receivers were not sensitive enough to capture the RF through the bush from the roads.

I was able to use the Kraken a couple of times and when I did I was able to provide a location both times to the recovery teams, one was within 50 meters and the other was 100m of the actual landing location, I am quite impressed. This was the original reason I bought the unit. One good thing about operating far from anything, the RF bands tend to be pretty quiet!

The setup I was using was with a laptop running the Oracle VM version, linked to a cell phone. Boy are the programs power hungry though. My original setup was using the Pi4 but I found the laptop was providing less latency. It really does need a lot of CPU.

David

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Thanks for sharing, it’s really nice to hear success stories like this!

I would say that latency doesn’t really matter too much. If you want to use a Pi 4 to save power you won’t be losing much. More powerful computing mostly comes in handy when you want to track many channels at once, or much wider bandwidths.

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We launch in salvos up to 4 but then we have a mix of 433 Mhz and 915 Mhz telemetry options that are designed by the teams. Not sure it is there, but being able to save multiple configurations for multiple bands even within the same band would be nice since the the SDR is pretty narrow.

The tracking of multiple objects feature is great!
David

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