David Algeo
University of West Florida
Pensacola, FL

We used the AvaLan AW900mT OEM Module with a Yagi on the ground and short antenna on the aircraft.

The UWF UAV competed in the AUVSI competition http://www.auvsi.org/competitions/ in June of 2007 and place 9th in flight. More details on this competition can be found at http://uav.navair.navy.mil/seafarers/default.htm. The list of Schools that signed up for this competition are below however due to technical problems not all schools make it the competition:

• Cornell University
• North Carolina State University
• New York Polytechnic University
• University of Texas at Arlington
• Mississippi State University
• Virginia Commonwealth University
• Parks College, St Louis University
• University of Kentucky
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
• University of Manitoba
• University of California at San Diego
• University of West Florida
• Brigham Young University
• University of Colorado
• Embry Riddle Aeronautical University (Autono)
• University of Puerto Rico
• Texas Tech University
• The College of New Jersey
• University of California at Santa Barbara
• University of Texas (Austin)

Were happy to inform you that your product preformed perfectly without a single hint of a problem. Even with the small antenna on the aircraft the range of the AvaLan AW900mT was far more than we needed. The AW900mT maintained a full strength signal reading for the whole flight.

The competitions mission was to find and identify objects on the ground and report the object with its GPS location and direction to the judges. Unfortunately not all the equipment on our aircraft preformed as well as the AvaLan unit, we were not able to preform all the functions this year as we would have liked so first place was out of reach. However since this is our first year to fly we are pleased with 9th place. The goal for next year is top 4 and the AvaLan AW900mT will definitely be a part of the aircraft.

The camera was a 5megpixel that was configured to send low resolution pictures through the AvaLan AW900mT via the cameras on board web server. When an object was seen a high resolution (5megpixel) a picture was captured and stored on the camera SD card. At the end of each search pass the aircraft would make a turn to the next search path. During this search downtime period the high resolution picture was pushed to the ground through the AvaLan AW900mT link.

The AvaLan AW900mT allowed us to maintain telnet contact with our single board computer, camera and to retrieve the picture from camera. At no time during the competition did we lost contact with the aircraft.

The rest of the week the Phoenix with the AvaLan AW900mT will be on display at the Northwest Florida Micro-Aerial Vehicle Workshop at the Research and Engineering Education Facility, Eglin Air Force Base. Other events are in the works.

Manually following UAV using tripod mounted AW11 Yagi (40-degree transmission cone made it easy to track):

Omni antenna is mounted on plane (in front of red shirt):

See AW900m radio board at top of UAV cockpit: