Some of you may be wondering where the electronics are... Fear not, electronics Bsc ENG is my background so... For communications I plan to re-purpose a few old mobile phones. By installing cyanogenmod Android I can easily use the phone as a tether. so what? If my phone is inside the lifting kite. It gets a much better mobile data signal than I do on the ground... That's why I want to log into a higher altitude phone signal. 

At altitude the phone can also be reprogrammed to network with similar airborne phones... There are other projects on Hackaday making satellite based networks. Satellkite, kitellite, call it what you will higher communications devices work more efficiently. Tethered on a kite there are loads of ways to power them including airborne generation see kitesat

Hopefully my old phones can also simplify posting NOTAM operations data.

RPM and performance monitoring is also easy with old phones... However, check out FALCO EMOTORS

http://www.falcoemotors.com/?page_id=1209

Being oh so cool you can wirelessly adjust the performance characteristics of the generator... yay.

They also have a setting where the resistance of the generator can be controlled by a heart rate monitor... That's easily adapted to an rpm counter.

Fun Fun Fun...