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transponders------or active rfid

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kitedude

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does any body know much about them??

I'm looking to design a cheap system for tracking items that are lost at sea.
a range of 200m should suffice.

basic cost should be no mroe than 10 units fo your local currency
the detector can be failry basi, either leds or sound or LCD. looking at less than 100.

I've only started looking itnto the trasnducers so any advice would be greatful.

so far i have looked at the ones used for avalanche revoveries and wildlife tracking as i reckon these would be cheap and suit my needs.
 
Do you mean transponders?.

A transducer is a device for converting between different kinds of energy, for example a loudspeaker and a microphone are types of transducers.
 
Some things to think about -

Do you want this thing to transmit constantly once the item is "lost" - so that it might alert someone immediately, indicating it's "lost" status? Will you know that the item is "lost" - so that you can transmit a signal that will cause it to respond and transmit back (more or less transponder)? Does each item need a unique identification? How long will the system need to be powered - in other words, how long will it take you to find and recover whatever is lost?

Sounds like an interesting project but possibly something that's already been done commercially. Consider that if you plan on transmitting you'll need to address regulations related to that - especially if you can't control the transmitter.
 
yeah, silly mistake i am actually talking about transponders.

Item shouldn't be lost for to long.
I will give you more info.

Basically the idea is to incorporate a transponder into the foot of a kiteboard
(similar to wakeboard but rider gets pulled by large kite)
for safty reasons the rider isn't leashed to the board.
Often the two get seperated with strong winds or currents the board can get lost.
boards cost between 400-1000.
i plan on developing a system where the rider can come in land his kite. get out his or a communal detector and go locate his board.
individual id tags aren't needed although could come in handy for a system upgrade at a latter date.

for the detector i plan on using a beep or led, obviously encased in a waterproof housing.
 
RFID isn't what you need, that's short-range stuff.

you should try looking into tracking transmitters... like you see on those nature shows where they track animals with the special collars on... basically you attach a small radio transmitter to the board and then you use a reciever with a directional antenna... that way when the reciever is pointing toward the transmitter, you get a stronger signal than when it's not pointing at it, so you can tell what direction to go to find it...

if you do a search for "tracking transmitter" you can easily turn up a transmitter circuit like this one:
**broken link removed**
(of course, you'd have to run that one at higher power or find a better circuit to get a more usable range out of it)

as for the receiver, well I am no radio guru so I'll let others chime in on that one...
 
It seems to me that the antenna will be a big problem. You have a darn good ground plane, but I don't think an antenna that's in the same plane as the water is going to work. It seems that a vertical antenna is required, and is also difficult to implement.
Keep in mind that I don't even know enough about antennas to be dangerous. :roll:
 
maybe he could put a little sonar transponder on the bottom of the board, and use an underwater reciever, maybe with the cool spinning display like in submarine movies... that would be cool... just hope the board doesn't get flipped :lol:
 
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