This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I project proposes to develop a miniature remote tracking system with the capability to provide position location, data collection, and a data link that relays biological sensor information from migratory wildlife, such as ducks, geese, big horn sheep, and moose to wildlife researchers. This project will incorporate newly developed Radio Frequency products intended for the PCN frequency bands as well as a digital data recorder and a position location system. The objective of this project is to define the data link requirements and to design the system hardware and software, including a miniature, light weight, battery powered data recorder, Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, RF transceiver, base station transceiver, and a base station computer. Current wildlife data collection methods are labor intensive and yield incomplete information. The animals are observed for many hours continuously or are tracked using radio beacons. A remote tracking system would increase the types and completeness of biological information recorded, and allow many more animals to be studied. With the proposed wildlife tracking system, the researcher need only be located in the vicinity of the studied animals to download a week month, or year's worth of data into the base station computer, without having to observe or disturb the animals. Phase I consists of the system engineering required to: define interfaces and protocols, perform a RF link analysis for the remote system, select candidate hardware for both ends of the remote link and the data logger, generate a prime power budget, define software requirements, and estimate total system performance.
