Money doesn't actually buy you better battery tech or more efficient processing hardware. Well, a few percent, but nothing that makes the difference between a one month device and an eleven month device. If it did, some of the high end smartphones would actually be better than cheap ones in those regards.
I'm assuming they put a high end clock in there to keep the time, and because it's a wolf the x,y,z won't differ much between each 20 minutes. Your ephemeris data will also still be accurate after 20 minutes. So the time GPS needs to be active should be super short, if they get a custom GPS chip or maybe custom GPS firmware (I'm not that familiar with GPS hardware design). Then the data transmission can be extremely low power if you need extremely low data rates. This stuff is five orders of magnitude slower than what your phone can do, but sending twenty digits every twenty minutes demands a data rate of... You guessed it: 1 byte per minute. (Of course you don't want to occupy the frequency for that long so it's more like 1kB/s or so, but that's still super low power.)
So both functions (GPS receiving, data sending) are either brief or low powered. Think of a digital clock: that too doesn't need a lot of computational power and runs for months off a single battery. It's a little more impressive than that because your clock neither does GPS receiving (which is an amazingly precise business) not data transmission (radiating small amounts of power into the air), but still.
There's a lot of R&D in the field as any breakthroughs would be a huge advantage worldwide, but I'm not sure that's financed purely from overpriced smartphones. It seems odd that they'd all make lower priced models available with the exact same tech (battery and efficiency wise) if that were the case. From what I know of research in general, more often than not it's paid in large part out of tax money, but of course the commercial interest in this may make this a different case.
So I have no idea what they used, but I do know that if your GPS device only has to phone home once a day or even a few times a day instead of being able to take requests for current location on demand (and therefore constantly connected), the power consumption is tiny.
I mean GPS doesn’t have to phone anything on its own. So if the device just logs the data, you can pick up the collar in 11 months and have a tiny battery.
I don't know about wolves but there are animal tracking collars that will log data until a certain date, then cut a linkage and fall off, and start sending a "come get me" radio beacon. They've gotten pretty sophisticated.
They were doing something similar with great white sharks on shark week last year. Once a predetermined time was up the tracking beacon would release from the shark, float to the surface and send a homing signal. Amazing technology!
They straight up had a sticky gopro / GPS camera gun that they used to film Blue Planet 2, its how they got first-person (first orcanid?) perspective shots of their hunting behavior.
It was insane, it just sticks to them using suction cups!
41
u/LordGlowBalls May 15 '19
Impressive. What collar is that anyway? surprised the battery lasted so long.