DEVELOPMENT OF A GROUND STATION RECEIVING SYSTEM FOR HIGH ALTITUDE ATMOSPHERIC DATA ACQUISITION

Abstract

The development of a ground station receiving system for high altitude atmospheric data acquisition will serve as an alternative means of getting atmospheric parameters. A cost effective and user’s friendly electronic receiving system for acquiring atmospheric data (such as temperature, pressure, relative humidity and GPS data) used for diverse purposes is presented. A ZigBee wireless transceiver module is interfaced with a microcontroller (Arduino UNO) which in turn is interfaced with a personal computer (PC) through a serial communication interface (Universal Serial Bus). The ZigBee transceiver (in receive mode) receives signals at 2.4 GHz being transmitted from another ZigBee transceiver (in transmit mode) at a maximum altitude of about 1.6 Km. The transmitted data using ZigBee communication protocol is retrieved by the ZigBee receiving module and then passed to the microcontroller programmed in C language and compiled using avr-gcc compiler on the Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) software. The microcontroller stores the acquired data on an external memory (Micro SD Card) and also sends the data to a personal computer (PC) through the interface. A graphical user interface (GUI) was developed for the PC using MATLAB software for time-recording, display and analysis of the received data. Real time data was received at the test site (Idanre hills in Ondo State, Southwestern Nigeria) between altitudes of 327.00m to 464.5m. From the data obtained, graph of temperature and pressure against altitude were plotted and the variation pattern were compared to that plotted with the International Standard Atmosphere model Equation. This was observed to follow similar pattern (values of temperature and pressure decreases with altitude within the troposphere