Over on the SDRGPS blog Philip Hahn and fellow aerospace engineer Paul Breed have been working together to try and use an RTL-SDR to help get accurate GPS data for tracking small high powered rockets. They write that their end goal is to be able to “track high power rockets in high acceleration / speed / altitude environments”.
In their latest attempt they launched a rocket with an RTL-SDR on board with it capturing GPS data to be later processed with GNSS-SDR. The goal was to get a GPS fix throughout the flight. Unfortunately they found that a good fix was only obtained while the rocket was on the ground, and not much data was obtained while it was in the air. They write that they suspect that the fault lies in the vibration in the rocket which can affect the frequency stability of the crystal oscillator, or in the GPS satellite tracking loop algorithm.
They still hope to be able to get some usable information from the flight by trying other algorithms on the data, but they are also seeking advice from anyone who might know how to help them, so please contact them if you know anything that may help.
If you are interested in this, then see our previous post about how Philip showed us how to use an RTL-SDR to receive and plot GPS data.
The post Using an RTL-SDR on a high powered rocket to capture GPS data appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.