(Forgive me if this is posted twice, I tried posting yesterday but it didn’t seem to show up)
I work with high-elevation montane birds and am trying to get motus coverage over our study areas. This area is tough for the typical installations I’m familiar with because of ice, wind, tree canopy (at lower elevations), topography, competing signals, and infrastructure from other groups in the area.
I’m in a conversation with some folks who have a series of weather stations in our study area that might be a good fit for smaller-scale motus coverage. We’ve already concluded that the 6-9 element antennaes I have won’t work on them. The CTT nodes are discontinued and are too short distance. A couple questions…
Does anyone have suggestions for short-distance antennae rated for extreme conditions? We’d need 2-3km detection. The more discrete the better. 3-element yagi or omnidirectional?
My experience with motus is just using sensorgnomes/stations but these weather stations are already detecting and transmitting data in real-time from other (non-competing) frequencies. I wonder if it might be more efficient (and cheaper) to receive the coverted data (via funcube or CTT dongles) through their datalogger and what post-processing I would need to do before contributing to motus. Has anyone done anything like this? The weather folks are keen to try this idea over putting a sensorstation at each weather station (which is really beyond the scope of our budget at the moment anyway).
If anyone has set up ‘mini-stations’ in ways that be similar, I’d be grateful for a conversation on or off the group. Thanks in advance for your help!
On the CTT nodes: you can make CTT nodes from Adafruit boards, There have been links about this in this or the sensorgnome mailing list. So you shouldn’t rule out the CTT tags for this reason.
WRT the weather stations: anything is possible but it’s work. If these are data loggers then it would be some work not just to get the data onto them but then also off and to Motus. You also have to distinguish the Lotek gear and CTT: Lotek radios (FUNcubes) require a fair amount of power, CPU processing and produce quite some data, the CTT radios do not. There’s a lot more room for creativity with the CTT radios/tags, but of course you first need to decide what is going to work for your study!
I assume these stations don’t have internet access and are solar powered? What is your timeline and what level of technical support do you have? I can help putting a Sensorgnome-mini together but it’s not a turn-key solution.
Overall, it’s important to be clear about where the cost lies. The cost of the RaspberryPi in a Sensorgnome can’t be the issue. I assume it’s antennas + mounting + power that drives cost? If you were to integrate with the weather stations you would still have several antenna cables to feed into the enclosures and place radios inside. If those were my weather stations in that kind of environment the last thing I’d want is for someone to drill holes in my enclosures to feed fat antenna cables through, but maybe I misunderstand. (With the CTT radios you could mount those near the antennas and feed serial cables into the weather station loggers.) It seems much more reasonable to keep the Sensorgnome separate and share power & connectivity, if there is any. It really depends on the specifics…
Just to clarify- CTT Nodes are not discontinued, they are now on version 3 (V3) and are available to order on our website. They have both 434mhz and 2.4ghz receivers in them. They are not compatible with VHF (nor were they ever) because that requires decoding LoTek tags, which we do not do given the proprietary nature of the tags and the existing relationship between LoTek and Motus. CTT Motus dongles, used to add 434mhz antennas to existing Sensorgnomes (via USB), were discontinued but we publicly released the radio firmware and directions for building your own so the DIY community would have an option. CTT Motus dongles are not required for use in CTT SensorStations as each SensorStation has five 434mhz channels soldered on the board itself. The only time you’d need an additional CTT Motus dongle on a SensorStation is if you wanted to add more than five 434mhz channels.
Cheers
David
David A. La Puma, PhD (He/Him) • Vice President, Global Market Development
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Apologies for the confusion about the nodes, and great to see there is a 3.0!
Thorsten, thanks for the quick reply. At this specific location, we are using CTT tags (hybrid tags), the only reason for including the 166.38 freq for Lotek tags would be to be a better contributor to motus by detecting both frequencies. :) (ecologically, we also could have dispersal from other sites where partners have deployed lotek tags as well but that’s not a core objective).
The weather stations are solar powered, so being a power hog is definitely something we need to keep in mind. The stations use radio link internet to transmit data every 1-15 min.
We’re putting out tags this summer so it would be great if I can get something working before they migrate in september. But this is a longer term partnership I am trying to build so we could try some things this summer without scaling over the entire weather station network. They have a dedicated IT and tech person to help me integrate this into their system. But the motus side is just me. :)
The costs that concerned me were receivers if scaling across multiple stations. Individual sensorstations (@$1k ea) at each one might be unnecessary if they already were logging data. We could provide the antennae, cables and they would provide the power (unless we’re taking up too much power, and then I’d have to add another solar panel).
Ugh, thanks for correcting the use of "CTT nodes", my bad. For clarity: CTT
nodes are small devices with radios to receive tag communication and then
relay those to a SensorStation further away via another radio link (I hope
I got that right). The initial post was about CTT Motus dongles as David
points out.
The CTT dongles output a line of text for each tag detection (the format differs between pre-V3 and V3 dongles). It should be doable to feed that into a commercial datalogger and process the lines at the other (server) end. At that point all management would be in the hands of whomever manages the datalogger, from ensuring each port gets tagged identified correctly to getting the data to you. It also seems within power budget to add a Raspberry Pi (could be a model Zero, especially if you use just one CTT dongle) so you can run the Sensorgnome software and manage things yourself, the feed into the weather station would need to be figured out. There are pros and cons to both approaches. If you want to pursue this further please start a discussion including the weather station tech person. (I’m also happy to answer questions here.)
Maybe it is an easier way to use a WiFi router and run both systems on that WiFi network? The small Huawei routers I don’t recommend, because if that goes down by power depletion, it needs a hard restart. I don’t no other options yet, but they are for ure available!