Radio Receiver Design for Unmanned Aerial Wildlife Tracking

The use of radio collars is a common method wildlife biologists use to study behavior patterns in animals. Tracking a radio collar from the ground is time consuming and arduous. This task becomes more difficult as the size and output power decreases to accommodate animals as small as an iguana. Our solution is to fly a low cost Unmanned Aerial System equipped with a sensitive receiver chain to locate several transponders at once. The challenge is that the system needs to be low cost and be able to detect the transponder within a range of tens of feet. Initial ground tests indicate that the system was able to detect a collar 70 feet away for under $100.