Hi Folks,

Although I've had my tinyduino since the kickstarter, I haven't really had much of a chance to play with it. My electronics knowledge is also a bit sparse, since it's been 20+ years since my high school classes ;-) So, open question.. Would the new Long Range Radio Shield mentioned in the last email newsletter be suitable as a basis for a locator beacon?

We live out of town, with cats, and surrounded by coyotes. Every now and then we have a hard time trying to find one of them before dark. I'd love to be able to knock up something that generates a radio signal every few seconds and have a second device that could 'latch' onto it and give an idea of direction/signal strength.

Cheers, Mark. 

Well based on the specs, Tiny Circuits plans to have a RF range of over 500 meters. This is about 1/3 of a mile. What could be really cool is to use the the 433MHz radio shield with the GPS shield and have it transmit coordinates to another Tinyduino with the Tinyscreen display This can then give updates on location. Add another GPS unit to the receiver and it could calculate how far away and which direction to travel.

If there was a shield using the HopeRF RFM69HW, RFM69CW, RFM69HCW range that would be truly awesome. People seem to have got 1.5 miles from the high power version with an external antenna.

But the external antenna might not work in the case of attaching it to an animal. Here is a link to something using the hope similar to the cat problem http://www.instructables.com/id/Uber-Home-Automation/step15/Dog-Tracker/