Hobby rocket telemetry

Thread Starter

Kevil

Joined Jun 28, 2020
224
Which receiver and transmitter to use to transmit telemetry (gyroscope, accelerometer and GPS) from a hobby rocket flying to an altitude of 3,000 meters? I will use ATSAMD21 MCU. Data will be transmitted each 20 ms.
 

Ya’akov

Joined Jan 27, 2019
10,235
LoRa is good, but it may well be overkill. While it will be quite far away it will also be quite high making the communication inherently line of sight which means quite a bit more range per watt of radiated power. Adding a gain (directional) antenna makes it even more likely to get a good signal.

LoRa is specifically designed for low bandwidth operation. It stretches its link budget by dropping the data rate quite low. Your application requires a fairly high data rate. An order of magnitude estimate is a continuous 400 bits per second of payload (not including the protocol overhead) but if you need to be lossless you will have to include either forward error correction data or a guaranteed delivery protocol.

The former is probably OK but if you have to count on ACKs, NAKs, and retries as in the latter you will not be able to keep up. I think you just need a best effort continuous stream and to live with dropped messages.

In any case, based on size of the antenna, availability of modules, and operating regulations my first suggestion would be to investigate 2.4GHz options. Cheap. small, and sufficiently high bandwidth, I believe you will find something that works for you in that band relatively easily.
 
Top