Radio telemetry antenna design system for tracking small and slow moving objects

Abstract

In the present market there are many Radio-Telemetry techniques which are used to track fast moving objects. However, no radio tracking system has been designed that will work in every situation [1]; for instance, radio telemetry is commonly used to estimate locations of wildlife. The interest of this research is to locate remote moving wildlife by using current technology. There are large varieties of animals with different size and speeds of movement one example of these animals are turtles, the same tracking system used for fast moving animals cannot be used on animals that are slow and small. A main issue of these systems is that they require a continuous transmission; therefore, large battery packs are required. On the other hand, the proposed system has been designed in such a way that does not require the transmitter to be always active. In the initial design process the data accuracy of different directional antennas are compared when they are used to estimate the location of the object. For that purpose, a MATLAB code has been developed, in which a virtual area is created. The location of the object is randomly generated inside this virtual area and both the antennas are rotated with same step size and the respective gains of each antenna was recorded for each point for the location of the object. For simulation purposes a square area of 1 km by 1 km was considered. For this experiment the antennas are rotated with a step size of 5 degrees. The simulation results showed that as the step size is increased the error in locating the object also increases. This experiment was performed using an Array antenna, a Horn antenna and a Yagi-uda antenna, the results showed that even though the horn antenna and yagi-uda antenna has a higher directionality the gain was minimum when compared with array antenna. However these results were obtained assuming ideal conditions where factors like noise, range and scattering of signal were not considered.