GPS

Designed by Robert Moore

Kite Altitude World Record

Global Positioning System & Telemetry

Most people in western societies and many people in third world countries have at least heard of GPS if not experienced the use of a GPS unit in their car in the form of navigators or on hiking trips with a hand held unit. Just 20 years ago GPS was for the military or the privileged few. In fact it was developed by the US military to enhance their operations including navigation, battle strategy, weapons deployment, asset tracking and troop location. It's full capabilities were only made available to the public after commercial interests purchased the rights from the US Government with lobbing from the Congress but with it's accuracy detuned to avoid hostile use by foreign forces and terrorists. GPS is now used for literally thousands of tasks including land surveying, asset tracking, vehicle navigation and aircraft navigation. In recent years the US military have removed some restrictions on the GPS standards which have allowed very accurate tasks such as land and building surveying to be carried out. This improvement of accuracy also makes my kite altitudes easily measured within 10 meters for altitude and 2 meters for position. This represents up to 0.2% accuracy for height and 0.04% accuracy for position. There have been a number of technical advances such as DGPS or Differential Global Positioning System and WAAS to make the GPS even more accurateThese units are relatively innexpensive, the cheapest Garmin units such as the Geko are only $A99. Originally the smaller unit, the Geko, had more memory and track poinst so could record a 10 hour flight. The cheaper unit, the etrex, had only enough internal memory for 3,000 track points. Frequently it would only record the last 4 hours of a flight cutting off the record of the first 1/3 of the flight.
After the Garmin Geko was discontinued the new Garmin etrex gained the ability to store 10,000 track points so is now capable of 10 hour flight recording. The Garmin units are used as a secondary or backup of kite altituderecords. The GPS data is virtually uneditable so represents rock solid verification for record authorities.

Here we have an array of communicationn and tracking devices. L - R front: Motorola Walkie-talkie, 2 Garmen etrex GPS units, Garmin geko GPS unit, Titley Electronics 161 Mhz tracking transmitter. Rear: Alinco Scanner/Reciever and Yagi Directional Antenna.

The early model Garmin etrex had limited track recording memory.
Late models have almost identical appearance but inherited more features from the Garmin Geko including larger memory for more track points.

Above: (L) is a GPSFlight radio telemetry module and (R) the RX3 base unit.
This model is a STXe 900 Mhz spread spectrum radio with Garmin 15H GPS module. It collects the GPS signal then relays the positional data back to the RX3 - base unit. The base unit connects via USB to a laptop and the data is displayed on proprietry software developed by GPSFlight. The altitude and position of the kite is displayed in real time which is an enormous benefit to our flight strategies.

Above is a horizontal kite track as produced by the GPSFlight telemetry unit and software. It shows the starting point on the right and how the kite may be subject to big wind direction changes as it climbs through the atmosphere.

Above is an altitude profile as displayed by the Garmin Mapsource program. The red dots represent track points where the garmin unit takes a positional snapshot. The interval is controlled to preserve battery life and memory. This data is transfered via serial cable to laptop to save and display.

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Garmin geko is smaller than etrex yet has a few more features, the most important is the ability to record 10,000 track points or over 10 hours of air time compaired to 3,000 points for the etrex.

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These traces are produced by GPSFlight telemetry software, GPS Dash. On the left is the horizontal track and on the right, the vertical profile. Underlying these graphs are the data streams which can be produced in a number of formats, particularly valuable for record verification and also can be exported to MS Excel for display and graphical presentation.