GPS chip for the near-space mission

The GPS chip, I ordered has just arrived and am starting the work by tomorrow. I chose a SIRF III based custom built GPS chip from Inventek. The reason behind my choice are as follows.

1) ISM300F2-C5-V0004 is one among the few commercially available GPS chips that are capable of working up to 42 km high.

2) Inventek has a very good/polite/caring sales team. I had a big conversation for atleast 20 days with Nancy Rose, who very well knows my order quantity is less than 5 GPS chips. Every email was instant and they gave a good support and recommended the right chip to choose for my purpose.

3) The chip is really compact than I expected. The size of the chip is 18mm X 18mm x 3mm which is very much smaller than a 1 rupee coin. The power consumption is also rated very low, however I have not tested it yet.

4) The chip has serial port for communication with flight computer.

Here are some pictures of the chips I received. The other chip slightly bigger than the GPS chip is the GPS antenna that fits to the GPS chip which you can to buy from Inventek.

Indian High Altitude Balloon Club

Here, we go. Having a dream dumped deep into your head for past 16 years and finally started to work towards making it come true is not a joke. My Godfather (50 years elder to me, who brought all the interest in me towards electronics and science) once wanted to fool his friends by flying a balloon with some cheap inert gas fitted with a flashing bulb. He actually wanted to fool his friends saying it was a Alien ship. This happened back in 1993, but by that time, it was hard for him to find inert gas to fill his balloon. So he dropped the idea. However he gave me a spark about the idea of flying a balloon too high with some electronics. Today after 16 years, I thought of making it true and started working on it.

Photo from High altitude object project

Here is my plan. The first mission will have a helium filled weather balloon fitted with the avionics and recovery system. For the avionics, I am planning to have a Micro processor based computer interfaced with 2 temperature sensors (one for internal and another for external temperature.), Pressure sensor, Cameras, Storage chip, humidity sensor, GPS receivers, radio transceiver, and recovery components. The recovery components include buzzers, Balloon cutter and rest will be decided after few tests.

My target is to reach 38 km in altitude, photographs as much as possible and certainly to recover the flight computer. Though I have a telemetry device to transmit all data to ground device, I am also having a recorder which will store all data on-board. The photographs are not transmitted in the first mission. I'll be posting every single step, I move towards with project so the other will be benefited with my experience. If my first 2 missions are a success, then I'll lend any component to people in India who are interested to test it in any part of the country. Ofcourse free of cost. But lets first hope to recover it back.

You can checkout all the images here in my account.