GPS receiver

[DM]

Has anybody here looked into making their own GPS reciever ?

I am thinking of designing one to go into my model rocket, to feed back real
time position data to a laptop, however I don't have much of a clue where to
start.

Map data is not important, the key data shall be the raw lat, long and alt
plotted against time, this can then be used to give a time displacement
graph, from launch location.

All the people on the net I have spoken to about rocketry GPS tend to use
off the shelf devices, such as the GARMIN GPS12, and then interface to
those.

Am I thinking about attempting the near impossible here ?

 

[Jim Thompson]

On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 20:44:11 -0000, "DM" <danmessenga@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Has anybody here looked into making their own GPS reciever ?

I am thinking of designing one to go into my model rocket, to feed back real
time position data to a laptop, however I don't have much of a clue where to
start.

Map data is not important, the key data shall be the raw lat, long and alt
plotted against time, this can then be used to give a time displacement
graph, from launch location.

All the people on the net I have spoken to about rocketry GPS tend to use
off the shelf devices, such as the GARMIN GPS12, and then interface to
those.

Am I thinking about attempting the near impossible here ?

Got any experience working at 1.6GHz?

I designed the analog portions of the Garmin chipset.

But I *buy* finished products ;-)

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

 

[Mjolinor]

"DM" <danmessenga@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:bnrt71$152i5k$1@ID-59554.news.uni-berlin.de...

Has anybody here looked into making their own GPS reciever ?

I am thinking of designing one to go into my model rocket, to feed back
real
time position data to a laptop, however I don't have much of a clue where
to
start.

Map data is not important, the key data shall be the raw lat, long and alt
plotted against time, this can then be used to give a time displacement
graph, from launch location.

All the people on the net I have spoken to about rocketry GPS tend to use
off the shelf devices, such as the GARMIN GPS12, and then interface to
those.

Am I thinking about attempting the near impossible here ?


Buy a Trimble GPS board off ebay. They are pretty much self contained and

provide NMEA output. You will also need an 802.11 client and something to
take the data from the GPS and send it out over the 802.11. I hope you are
talking reasonble sized rockets here because the power requirement will be
no small item. The advantage of the Trimble boards is that they will run at
10 Hz so you will get a meaning ful ammount of data rather than the 1
reading per second you get from a "normal" GPS.

Just my thought on it, there are probably lots of other solutions but I fear
that building the GPS from scratch is pretty mind boggling.

 

[Chris Hodges]

"DM" <danmessenga@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<bnrt71$152i5k$1@ID-59554.news.uni-berlin.de>...

Has anybody here looked into making their own GPS reciever ?

I am thinking of designing one to go into my model rocket, to feed back real
time position data to a laptop, however I don't have much of a clue where to
start.

I wonder how much you could strip down an already light receiver - if
you got rid of the case, shared batteries and removed the (rather
large) screen the basic ones would be pretty light. I've got a Garmin
eTrex, the cheapest (and smallest) I could get in the UK, and even
that has serial comms.

Not sure if you could get it model-rocket light though - depends on
your rocket. Obviously OEM kit has the potential to be better, if you
can get hold of it at a sensible price.

Chris