Old Tracking Antenna Project

Owned by Christopher Chung
Last updated: 2023-02-07 by Egor Gorelyy
2 min read

Started here:

Related Info:

Old repo from 7 years ago, could be nice reference: UWARG/TrackingAntenna

Matlab demo: https://github.com/UWARG/kitchen-sinks/pull/8

 

Mechanical Design

We need to control both the pitch and yaw for the antenna.

Pitch can be potentially dropped if proven challenging to implement.

Assume the antenna assembly is about 1KG for now.

 

A neo m8 gps module will be installed to the stationary part of the system, facing up

2 motors will control the pan and tilt of the antenna.

The antenna will be able to spin 360 degrees yaw

Pitch adjustment should at least be able to go from ~20 degrees to ~90 degrees

 

Scuff draft

 

TODOs:

  • What kind of motors do we need?

  • How fast do we need to turn the antenna

  • What sort of calibration do we need on power-on

Antenna Type

A patch antenna should work good enough?

The RFD900x covers 902-928MHz


Helical and yugi-uda antenna seem to both have an effective range of 30 degrees

Patch antennas looks like they work up until 60 degrees

 

Target gain about 16dbi ish

 

Some rough research:

A matching 16dbi parabolic antenna is about 3KG

This 16dbi yagi antenna is about 4.5KG

This 12.5dbi patch antenna is about 1KG

I can’t seem to find any >=12.5dbi patch antenna…

TODO: how much gain do we need?

 

Some photos from other teams for reference

A helical antenna

Meeting notes

Don’t really need pitch control, since we’ll ever be 75 degrees off axis, and only 400 ft away (when the drone is right on top of the tent)

RFD900 tower is limited to 1 rotation, wired (or a few, until we twist the wires too much, software limited)

We might use the next tower wireless/slip ring

 

What motor are we using? steps to degree and exact detail

GPS sensor: Neo M8

Get telemetry team to send the gps info over to our nucleo