Cellular GPS reporting? | Other subsystems | Forum

in light of brmj's post about SparkFun electronics' awesome $100 give away, I've started looking through their <= $100 products to see if there is anything we can use for OHKLA.

This device looks incredibly handy.  It includes a GSM celluar communication engine and a GPS receiver: "Call up the module, issue the GPS query command, and you'll have NMEA data! If this unit is within range of a cellular tower, you'll know where it is within 9 meters anywhere on the surface of the earth".  This might be an excellent way to find out where our rocket lands so we can recover the data.  It would require no communications infrastructure on our part, as long as someone at the launch site has a cell phone on them.

Unfortunately, it costs more than $100, so we couldn't get it free with their promotion, however this device is the exact same cellular communications engine without the GPS built in for $99.95, which we could get, and they have a wide range of GPS devices for less than $100.  I wonder how hard it would be to use two separate devices to reproduce the function of the first?  We would need to ask somebody with some EE knowledge.  This approach would take up a little more space and mass than the one integrated item, but it would save us some money.  Not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but we're not exactly rich at the moment.

The only possible issues I can forsee is that we may not be able to attach an antenna to the rocket in a position that ensures good signal and aerodynamics and reentry survivability, and also that if we are launching in a remote desert location for safety there may not be good cellular coverage – I don't know what coverage is like in the US.