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What is the maximum altitude GPS will report?

Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2009 10:38 am
by mattadata
I have a Motorola i290. I plan on attaching this to a weather balloon and letting it ascend to about 100,000 feet, and then safely return via parachute.

I not only want to be able to recover it using AccuTracking, but also want AccuTracking to log the maximum altitude the balloon reaches.

I have come across two other attempts of this on the web using similar phones, and both times it looks like the phone's GPS only reported a maximum altitude just shy of 20,000 feet.

Is this a hardware/software limitation of the GPS in the phone?

Re: What is the maximum altitude GPS will report?

Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2009 1:15 pm
by hutch109
Most are set for 60k max, and some speed limitations also - this is an export requirement from the DOD...

The phone uses A-GPS, so sometimes if it loses the ground based assistance - which it will - it can get confused and not fix properly.

I don't know of a specific limitation by Motorola - but it would not surprise me, since most people don't use their phones at 20k feet - heck, some of us can't use them at 850 feet ASL... haha. ;)

Eric