Onboard transponder

[tailwind76]

Hello.

Has anyone ever seen a thread or an idea about an onboard transponder for pylon racing?

Our club was talking the other night night about how it would be usefull to make a wireless transponder to go into the plane to know when is is over the pylon or if they skipped in side the marker.

Would a person use some sort of scaled down DME equipment or IR for this?

Any help would be great.

Trent

[Radiofly]

What would be great for this application is what is known generally as an RF-ID system. I don't know much about these, but know that there are several types of RF-ID. Many are very short range, inches to up to about 10 feet and use a paper thin printed circuit inductor and chip on the item you want to track. The paper thin, stamp size circuit is programmed with a unique ID and when it passes near the transmitter (which would be on the pylon), it becomes resonant and self powered and transmits the ID back to the pylon receievr (It is a sort of transceiver). Some gas companies use a form of this technology for customers to use instead of a credit card. Some bookstores put these devices in their books to guard against theft. Some bike races use these on their riders to track their passing through checkpoints. The paper thin circuit must cost cents. The exciting/reciever transceiver thingy coupled with the tracking software is probably expensive.
So, at any rate...it would be interesting to see if these things are hackable and whether one can DIY.

[tailwind76]

I was thinking more along the lines of a 2 transevers, one on the pylon one in the plane.

I thought about sending a rf or ir signal to the aircraft and calculating the return time and find the distance.

Other idea is to have a IR reciever on the ground and the emitter on the plane. when it passes over to it reads it and sends a signal.


Thoses are my ideas

Trent

[Mr DIY]

Some food for thought. :)

An RF system will probably be more difficult than you think. You may get a signal when plane passes, but it will not tell you if you cut the pylon unless you are able to direct your transmitted energy into a defined area.

Infrared .. hmm .. not sure how this will work. Outdoors in the sun. Don’t think it will work to well.

However .. have you considered Ultrasonics. A number of transducers could be used to send out a ‘beam patten’ with an Rx looking for a reflected signal. This idea then allows detection of the aircraft flying around a pylon. The aircraft may not need any electronics onboard. Range might be a problem though, but then you could add ultrasonic responders to aircraft to increase range. Oh yes .. you could measure distance to plane as well with such a system

Just some thoughts.
Brian

[treehog]

I would also like a similar solution that works

My own idea is to couple a web cam to my laptop and put this near to pylon
the web cam could recieve a piture (black blob against blue sky)divided into Segments

When the black blop passes some reference point the laptop sends a signal sound along a long cable back to pilot which indicates turn

Unfortunatly this would not work with more than one craft

Ralf

[tailwind76]

I have also thought about a web camera pointed straight up with a line drawn accross it. if the plane cut the line they are over the pylon but if they don't they have skipped.

one of the problems i see is that the frame rate on the web cams are slow only a couple of frames/sec and might miss the shot. also the distance the camera has to travel over the usb cable is probally limited to 300m or so.

Trent