Terra Tuesday: Motus tags to the cloud!

Casey again with Tuesday's update! We are a bit delayed getting this out due to a Kickstarter technical issue regarding update posting.

Above is the 434MHz helix antenna that we are using to receive Motus tags on the Terra. This is the standard antenna that will ship which each unit, unless you requested one with an external antenna.

This antenna, while looking small, is actually quite powerful. Our range tests show a 500 meter radius within a neighborhood with some trees and houses. This means that Terra can pick up tags from all of your neighbor's bird feeders, including your own, depending on your specific environment! 

As a stress test, we are running this receiver at CTT headquarters. There are lots of tags here that are under testing. While only one unit, we are simulating effectively the entire fleet of Terras in terms of data volume.

As we saw before with the BluMorpho tag test (AKA Monarch Butterfly tag), our database is barely breaking a sweat on the backend. Below is a days worth of database hits, measured in "average units" per second. Here is a sample of our tag data table, where we are able to receive the time when the tag was received, the tag ID, the signal strength, and which Terra received it:

This data will be used to show you how many radio tagged birds have made their way through your neighborhood on a given day. The data will also be provided to scientists who track migration patterns.

I will be back with more exciting developments next week!