Design and Development of Power Optimized Satellite Elephant Collar with Over the Air Programmability

A satellite elephant collar is a device mounted on an elephant's neck to track its position and movements. This information is essential for conservation and management of this highly endangered species. Currently available units are proprietary designs by few manufacturers and no literature can be found about their internal operation. This lack of published information hampers the evolution and development of future collaring systems with increased features and functionalities for research, conservation and management. Critical issues for improvement include live time of the collar, which is related to power consumption and operational modes of the unites, and remote programmability allowing for changes in data acquisition during deployment. Most commercially available collars lack the ability to change data acquisition schedules remotely over the air, and therefore data acquisition is un-optimized, which is directly responsible for un-optimized power consumption. This research was conducted to develop a satellite elephant collar with improved lifetime and remote programmability. A second purpose of our research was to make information on how to built elephant collars needs to become widely available to the user community,. This paper presents the particular issue of power optimization of satellite elephant collars. A functional test collar was designed using general purpose electronic components and a number of software and hardware optimization methods used during development which are presented in this paper. An expected life time over 580 days was achieved with eight D size Ultralife U10015 batteries for the prototype collar.