Telemetry, highly automated communications process by which measurements are made and other data collected at remote or inaccessible points and transmitted to receiving equipment for monitoring, display, and recording. Originally, the information was sent over wires, but modern telemetry more commonly uses radio transmission. Basically, the process is the same in either case. Among the major applications are monitoring electric-power plants, gathering meteorological data, and monitoring manned and unmanned space flights.

Types of telemetry system are:

• Aerospace telemetry
• Medical telemetry
• Meteorological telemetry
• Wild life telemetry
• Communication telemetry
• Defence telemetry etc.

Telemetry is used to study wildlife, and has been useful for monitoring threatened species at the individual level. Animals under study can be outfitted with instrumentation tags, which include sensors that measure temperature, diving depth and duration (for marine animals), speed and location (using GPS). Telemetry tags can give researchers information about animal behaviour, functions, and their environment. This information is then either stored (with archival tags) or the tags can send (or transmit) their information to a satellite or handheld receiving device.

Most activities related to healthy crops and good yields depend on timely availability of weather and soil data. Therefore, wireless weather stations play a major role in disease prevention and precision irrigation. These stations transmit parameters necessary for decision-making to a base station: air temperature and relative humidity, precipitation and leaf wetness (for disease prediction models), solar radiation and wind speed (to calculate evapotranspiration), water deficit stress (WDS) leaf sensors and soil moisture (crucial to irrigation decisions).

Because local micro-climates can vary significantly, such data needs to come from within the crop. Monitoring stations usually transmit data back by terrestrial radio, although occasionally satellite systems are used. Solar power is often employed to make the station independent of the power grid.