Reverse antenna tracking? Good idea or pointless?

[cwleveck]

Alright, so I have an antenna tracking system that points my high gain directly at my aircraft for increased range. I even have a diversity system with a low gain for when I get closer, etc.

But from what I understand (shortest book ever written) the tough part is downloading the location of the ever moving aircrafts gps info to a ground station which then magically computes through integrated slide rule technology that Ill never understand to a moron processing unit (as in for morons) and then says, oh crud, now its over there! and points my fancy coat hanger/aluminum foil rabbit ears in the general direction of my all but lost aircraft just before it disappears into a policemans backyard....

It seems like a small v antenna could be mounted on a continuous rotation servo (or a non continuous BROKEN servo you were trying to reverse which now just goes round and round....) and pointed in a slightly downward angle and a small moron computing arduwhatever board could be programmed to maybe take the same gps info and use that to point back to a non moving ground station continuously?

The benefits would be many, I think, or at least a couple im sure, the least of which would be the ground station could loose all telemetry and the poor lost little plane would at least be able to point the police directly back to where ever you launched from.

OR if for some reason you lost your downlink the aircraft would at least be looking for you and might be able to reestablish communication for one last "we are going in tell my wife I love he............".

Seriously though, If I want to get some really long distance flights wouldn't my range, or couldn't my range be seriously extended if both my antennas where reaching out to each other?

How hard would it be to program an arduino to always point back to the same point?

Any ideas?

[Terry]

In short yes, this is normal practice for some of the large UAVs. The weight penalty is high for smaller aircraft though and the drag has to be considered.

Terry