The project I am working on involves very long flight times (greater than 1 hour) at altitudes of up to 1000' feet (I know about the NAS restrictions but am just using this altitude as a target).
Because of the long flight times, it does not seem that barometric sensing would work (and I am not sure how accurate that would be anyway). Also, I understand that the altitude data from GPS is unreliable and can be off be several meters.
I have an ArduIMU and was just wondering if there is an accurate way of getting altitude data beyond sort of dead reckoning.
Thanks for any insight,
James
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If you are worried about weather changes and/or differing pressures at different locations, do it the way full scale aircraft do ... ask the ground!
In your case, get a second altimeter, feed it to your ground station, and every few minutes uplink the local ground level atmospheric pressure.
I would not say GPS altitude is unreliable. It is as reliable as the rest of the system. But its error is normally 150% of its horizontal error.