Development of an experimental telemetry system

Abstract

This article presents the design and implementation of a communications system to receive information about the status, height, speed, temperature or any other type of variable of interest from vehicles such as balloons or experimental rockets. In a first iteration, the system was designed to achieve transmission distances in the order of dozens kilometers but leaving some margin to extend the operating range to up to 100 km in line of sight. At the beginning of the project different factors such as the use of a frequency band suitable for this type of applications, the modulation scheme to use and a data protocol were analyzed. Subsequently, the most appropriate commercial devices to implement each of the system blocks were selected. With these components a first prototype of the telemetry board was built and the necessary tests to verify the correct performance of it were conducted. Finally, the design and implementation of the flight hardware was carried out and the final tests that fully validated the proposed design were performed.