[Noisebridge-discuss] warflying

Josh Myer josh at joshisanerd.com
Thu Dec 16 01:49:29 UTC 2010


On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 5:38 PM,
<travis+ml-noisebridge at subspacefield.org<travis%2Bml-noisebridge at subspacefield.org>
> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 10:12:25PM -0800, Jake wrote:
> > If the plane's body is nonmetallic you can keep the antennas inside
>
> Faraday cage, for lightning protection. :-(
>
> > I recommend a high-quality unit like a Garmin.
> > Better GPSs will update your location faster and in a plane, why bother
> > unless you're getting good data..
>
> Yeah, I checked out the gpsd webpage, and it appears garmins are
> either hit or miss, they talk like five or more protocols, depending
> on the model, and not all are useful.  If I don't hear specifics, I'll
> get the best-recommended one there.  They mention that some of them
> track much faster than others.
>
> I'm also wondering if the GPS data will be useful if I'm aiming out a
> window, since I'll actually be picking up an antenna somewhere
> different.  Maybe if I had an antenna pointing down... but as Dr. J
> pointed out, dipole antennas used on WAPs have a donut-shaped
> footprint.
>

Add a 3-axis accelerometer on the antenna handle, and track wifi signal
strength.  A bit of calculus later, and bob's your uncle (within some
tolerance *ε*).

The accelerometer, plus a GPS, plus an SD card for logging are all pretty
standard things to slap onto an Arduino (both Spacebridge and Project
Bacchus's 'duino-y flight computers, for instance).  As a bonus, if you use
another GPS receiver on the laptop, you can get perfectly correlated
timestamps for the two.

The only real gotcha is the terrain being not-entirely-level, so your
summation/triangulation isn't going to be perfect.  It should be perfect
enough, though.
--
/jbm
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