Ground station not receiving GPS data

[irowe]

Hey guys,

I'm new to the forum, but I've been working with the ukyeclipse team since the fall.

We haven't had the antenna tracker working in a while, and our issue seems to be that we cannot get GPS data for the ground station. We were able to work around this by manually putting in our location and pointing in a cardinal direction. However, we would like to have it automatically in the future. Right now when we do Get Local (arduino), the lat and long are zeros. How can we fix this?

I have read this eclipse.montana.edu/arduino-switch/ and I can't remember if at our last launch if we were set to direct or softserial. From what I gather, we should be set to SoftSerial. I am currently trying to test that but I am still getting zeros. The red "FIX" led is blinking about once every second, so perhaps I can't get a signal inside.

As a side question, and maybe this deserves a separate thread, but in the past our Iridium has experienced delays of up to 40 minutes. Another research group at UK told us this is normal. Would this make Iridium unfit for tracking?

Thanks so much!

[leviw]

Being inside can definitely interfere with GPS units on both the arduino and iridium tracker.

I would take them outside and try again. It can take a few minutes to get an initial fix. The antennas ARE directional so if you still can't get a fix, make sure the antennas are facing up, or at least not down.

The arduino was mounted on it's side by default, but it's a pretty good unit and seems to work fine like that. But it could be placed flat for better reception.

The iridium tracker should have the black antennas facing towards the sky. On the default plate that meant the iridium box with it's indicator lights were upside down. The orientation of that box doesn't matter, it's the antennas that should be facing up.

In our experience, both the iridium and arduino gps units have been very responsive. It usually takes us around 3-5 minutes for the cutdown signal to get to the payload, but MOST of the tracking points come through pretty quickly. It does drop a point now and then but it's pretty good.

[irowe]

Okay, this is very helpful. After switching to SoftSerial, I was able to get data from the Arduino. I had to turn off the power to the Arduino first to get that to take effect. Also, on our last launch, we didn't see an Iridium delay when using the new server, so we are less worried about that now.

Thanks so much for responding to these questions! It's a great help.