Radio tracking a tortoise - HELP!

How far does she travel in that time?

Ken

garden.

so

soldering

Hi Ken - in one afternoon she generally only goes say 30 metres, but if I don't find her that day, then the area I have to search gets much bigger, and so on with increasing time.

So a range of 200 metres would be fine as long as I find her in the first day or two. Of course greater range would be better - but I'm assuming that will need greater power - hencve a bigger battery. She's only 6 and weighs just over a kilo - so the transmitter nneds to be fairly small.

Regards

Floatything

There's numerous companies out there that make small, low-power 433MHz transmitters and receivers. Eg.

The page here has a good list of others:

The modules are under US$10 each (!) but you'll need to do a bit of nutting out to make it do something, but as you only want to do one thing (say, press a button on your tx and make the rx squeal a beeper) it should be pretty straight-forward.

Cheers.

Ken

Have a look at something like this :

There should be a (small) band of frequencies available about 150MHz that you can use for animal tracking. You will need a radio capable of receiving the frequency plus a handheld yagi antenna.

You might also enquire at yor local university to find out if anyone there is doing animal tracking and talk to them about designs, etc.

HTH Alan

-- Sell your surplus electronic components at

garden.

Thanks Alan - that is fantastic : I'm going to have to improve my soldering skills as the small transmitter is very fiddly, and I've yet to think where to place the antenna on the tortoise.

Many thanks indeed!

Floatything

In article , Floatything wrote: [....]

Just throwing an idea out there. I think you could do this:

ASCII art of top view

! ! ! ! [L]--------[xmitter------[L] ! ! ! !

The idea is to space this only a very small distance above the conductive body of the animal.

The capacitance from the wire to the body is distributed more or less uniformly along the length. The small inductors in the two arms make the system resonant. The radiation pattern should be very lumpy so that no matter which way the animal is facing, walking a short distance will take you out of a dead spot.