Launch day on iPhone: unboxing to recovery

A full launch-day workflow on AltosUI runs from the moment you unbox your TeleBT to the moment you pick up your rocket, and it lives in four tabs: Pad, Flight, Map, and Recover. This guide walks the whole arc and links out to the focused companion guides for each step, so you can drill in where you need to.

Before you leave the house

Two things make the field day easier. First, pair your receiver ahead of time — the TeleBT v4 pairing guide covers hardware verification and the Bluetooth handshake. Second, download the offline map tiles for the launch site you’re heading to. The offline-maps guide explains the zoom-and-radius knobs, including the Walking Tiles option that fills in the higher-zoom detail you need once you’re on foot during recovery.

If you need a license reminder: to legally operate an Altus Metrum flight computer in the US, you need at least a Technician-class amateur radio license. The canonical page is at altusmetrum.org/Radio, and the ARRL licensing page is the place to start if you don’t hold one.

Pad tab: pre-flight readiness

The Pad tab is your checklist before the countdown starts. It shows whether the flight computer is armed, whether each igniter has continuity, whether GPS has locked with enough satellites to be useful, battery voltages for both the rocket and the receiver, the firmware version on the flight computer, and the receiver’s own location.

Green means go. Work down the list and confirm each line reads what you expect. Rocket battery is healthy. Igniters show continuity. GPS has a fix. Receiver battery is healthy. The firmware version matches what you flashed on the desktop. If anything is wrong here, you want to know on the pad, not in the air.

Flight tab: live ascent

Once the rocket leaves the rail, the Flight tab is where your eyes live. It shows the current flight state, current and maximum height, current and maximum speed, tilt during boost on IMU-equipped hardware, and the range, bearing, and elevation to the rocket relative to your position.

The app also speaks. Voice narration calls out state transitions — pad, boost, coast, apogee, drogue, main, landed — and peak values as they happen, so you can keep your eyes on the sky instead of the screen. Speed callouts are direction-aware: the app says “ascending at N m/s” during boost and coast, “descending at N m/s” during descent, and a neutral “speed N” when vertical speed is below 1 m/s. GPS-derived announcements wait for a valid fix before speaking. See the voice-callouts guide for the full list.

For TeleGPS trackers the Flight tab shows a reduced set of fields, because GPS-only hardware has no accelerometer-driven state to report. That is expected behavior, not a bug — the TeleGPS guide covers it.

Map tab: ground track

The Map tab plots your rocket’s GPS track over an Apple Maps basemap. Your position, the pad, and the rocket are linked by lines so the ground track is legible at a glance. The map supports online Apple Maps or your pre-downloaded offline tiles, and three map types — Road, Hybrid, and Satellite.

If you have Launch Site overlays enabled in settings, the launch field shows as a shaded circle, and tapping the circle on a busy day toggles the visibility of flights clustered inside it. That matters at club launches where several rockets come up in quick succession on different channels. The launch-site overlay feature page has the details.

Recover tab: walk to your rocket

Once the rocket is on the ground, the Recover tab takes over. The default List mode shows bearing, direction, and distance from where you are to the last reported GPS position, along with the rocket’s coordinates and the flight’s maximum values. A mode selector at the bottom switches to Map or AR.

Recovery Map is a dedicated walking map — your blue dot, the rocket’s red-orange diamond, a colored route line that shortens as you close in, and a lower-right direction badge reading “ahead,” “right 47 degrees,” “backwards,” or “nearby.” AR Recovery HUD puts the same information on your camera view: a compass ribbon across the top, a distance strip on the right, and a world-locked targeting reticle that stays pinned to the rocket’s GPS position as you pan the phone. See the AR recovery guide for the walk-through and the GPS uncertainty circle for how to read the dashed accuracy ring.

Back at the car

AltosUI wrote a .telem file for the flight automatically. Every .telem file is named by date, serial, flight number, and receiver, and lives in the app’s Documents folder — reachable through the iOS Files app or iTunes Document Sharing. See the telem-files guide for how to get them off the device.

Tap a .telem file in Files and you get a Quick Look summary — date, serial, callsign, device type, max altitude, max ground speed — without launching the app. From the preview, Share → Open with AltosUI generates the full Flight Report: performance headlines, a phase timeline, an altitude chart, motor metrics, recovery analysis, advisories. The PDF export guide covers how to share it out as a paginated PDF before you’ve packed the car.

Want to replay the whole flight? Flight Replay feeds the recorded packet stream back through the same Pad, Flight, Map, and Recover tabs, at actual timing or a fast scan, so you can watch it unfold again.

One last word on experimental features

Several of the features you’ll lean on — the Recovery Map, the AR Recovery HUD, and the Flight Report — still carry an Experimental badge. They are fully built and in use in the field; they need field feedback to graduate. The GPS Uncertainty Circle rides along with them as a Technical Reference, not a standalone Experimental feature. See Help us ship these features out of Experimental for what to send and where.