A GPS BASED FLIGHT RECORDER FOR HOMING PIGEONS

摘要

To track the flight paths of pigeons, a special flight recording system has been designed to meet specific conditions of experiments performed with homing pigeons. The target of our investigations is to find out more about the navigational system of pigeons by tracking their routing behaviour. To find the most suitable tracking method most of the common artificial navigation systems have been compared. GPS was chosen because of its worldwide availability and its high accuracy. Further important requirements of such a tracking device are: frequent position fixes, low magnetic impact on the pigeon, low weight, low impact on the pigeons's behavior and flight dynamics. The most difficult requirement to meet is a total weight of the system of less than 30g. A suitable antenna and GPS board have been found. A datalogger based on an embedded microcontroller (PIC 12c509) and an EEPROM has been developed to store 1000 (8000) position fixes. The weight of the datalogger has been reduced to 2g and its power consumption to 3mA. Light and solid packaging materials are currently under investigation. The prototype which is based on heavier components has a weight of 90g. The weight will be reduced as soon as an already announced GPS-receiver will be available. Finally an intelligent power management circuit which is currently under developement will complete the requirement of a 30g max. weight.