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The SF10 family of laser altimeters was designed by people on this forum. Requests for new features and numerous emails about performance and applications has lead to the development of a compact, light weight, rugged design that can be used in many UAV applications.

We've produce three different versions, each with the same features but having different measuring ranges and representing three broad categories of application - close to the ground, intermediate flight operations and maximum legal altitude. The picture below gives an idea of where we see the different products being used:

We've matched the cost of available technology to the different operating requirements of small and medium scale UAVs, and the table below shows how we've managed the trade-off between price and performance:

                  Model           Laser                         Detector                          Maximum range          Price

                 SF10/C      High power         High performance APD             >120m                      High

                 SF10/B      High power               Standard APD                       >55m                       Medium

                 SF10/A      Low power                Standard APD                       >25m                        Low

In all models of the SF10 we've kept the energy of the laser pulses very low, making them Class1M - safe for human eyes, and because we believe in high reliability, all models have narrow band optical filters to cut out background sunlight.

Other standard features on all models include:

• USB port for entering configuration settings
• I2C bus with configurable address
• Serial port with configurable baud rate
• Analog output with configurable ranges
• Offset trim to match airframe

The team at LightWare would like to thank the hundreds of customers who have contributed to our ongoing effort to improve laser technology for UAS applications. We're having fun, I hope you are too!

L.D.