The DE-Link attitude determination and pointing system onboard stratospheric balloons provides a low cost, low weight and high accuracy method to increase the efficiency of WLAN communication between balloon and ground station. By determination of the 6-dimensional pose of the balloon gondola in real-time, the WLAN antenna can be pointed toward a known position on the ground. This removes the need for powerconsuming omnidirectional antennas. It also gives an improvement in communication speed and reduction of overall weight by the removal of heavy RF power amplifiers. The design uses a combination of GPS receivers, accelerometers and magnetoresistive circuits to determine the absolute attitude and position of the gondola in real-time, and two DC motors to point the antenna in azimuth-and elevation directions to compensate for the movements of the gondola. Ground based tests have shown the system to function well with a pointing error of less than ±2• .
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