The Rocket Tracker

Over the last few years, me and my dad have gotten more and more involved in the world of amateur high-power rocketry through our local branch of the Tripoli rocketry club. As we started working on bigger and more powerful rockets, we ended up having the same problem that so many others in the rocketry community have came across as well: when my rocket lands in a corn field, how do I find it? The most common solution is to equip the rocket with a long-range radio tracking device, and this can come in the form of small radio direction finding (RDF) beacons for falconry to GPS-based tracking devices that sometime require HAM licensing. I thought it would be a fun challenge to design my own tracking device to launch in our rockets, so here we are! It has certainly been an adventure designing my own tracking system and I’ve learned so much about PCB design, electronics, and RF along the way.

Concept

The rocket tracking system consists of two components, the actual tracker that goes into the rocket, a nd a “receiver” or base station that stays on the ground and receives information from the tracker in the rocket. Originally I had planned to make the receiver a self-contained device using a Raspberry Pi with a screen, but after going down that path a bit I realized that it was unnecessarily complex and a Raspberry Pi was expensive and overpowered. Going forward, I plan on using a rp2040 microprocessor to create a base station “dongle” with its USB capability. For the actual tracker, my idea from the start was to use an ESP32 because of its bluetooth capabilities and powerful processor. The tracker would also include a GPS, magnetometer, gyro, barometer, and high-g accelerometer for gathering flight info and keeping track of the rocket. Aside from this, the most important component of the tracking system is the radio system that allows the tracker to send data back to the base station, for this I chose to use a HopeRF RFM97CW LoRa module because of it’s high power and relatively low price.

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