Are you planning on launching a high altitude balloon and need a GPS tracker to recover your payload?  Take a look at the GL300 GPS Tracking Device to help you track and recover your balloon and payload.  

LoneStar Tracking has been a part of several high altitude balloon launches and would love to be a part of yours also!  If you are a school or university, please contact us to see about a free or discounted tracking device for your balloon.  In return, we just ask for a couple of your amazing photos to put on our site!  

The balloon GPS tracker has a weight of 93g, contains a 2600mAh battery for two weeks of operation, and is only 40mm x 27mm x 78mm in size.  The manufacturer of the tracking device has only rated the device to operate at -20C for extended amounts of time, however our experience has shown that the balloon trackers will operate at much lower temperatures.  

We do recommend that the high altitude balloon gps tracking device be placed inside of your payload to help insulate the electronics. 

Our tracking device is unique in that it operates on the LTE eMTC/NB-IoT B2/B4/B12/B13 bands.  This means that our device will operate on ATT, TMobile, Sprint and Verizon networks to give you ultimate coverage.  Payload recovery is key and having a GL300 GPS Tracker backed by LoneStar Tracking can mean the difference in recovering your payload or loosing it.

The latest version of the GL300 also utilizes the GNSS or Global Navigation Satellite System.  This system not only uses the American GPS system, but also the European and Russian satellite systems.  This will give the tracking unit over 50 different location satellites to lock onto to obtain a position fix, where as other tracking devices utilize only the American GPS system which would allow for a maximum of 12 satellites at any given time.

Altitude measurements can very because the device transmits it’s position information via the cellular networks.  If your balloon reaches 100km, and we hope it does, then the odds of the device communication with terrestrial cellular networks is about 0.  The device will store its elevation, position and speed data in memory, then upload that data once it re-establishes a network connection.

Technical Documents are available here.