Be patient folks. If there is a quirk that needs to be addressed, a lot easier for Mr. Amos to deal with the fewer units out in the field than a large population. Once released for general use, I'll bet you'll be far happier it has been refined. The drool factor
at walking right up to ones rocket is rightly enticing as anyone can tell you who's flown GPS trackers in years past. Problem then was the horrendous price premium of > $1000.00. Once my rocket goes out of sight, I don't bother looking up anymore.
I look head down at the map screen and watch where it's going. When it gets close to main deployment altitude, I look right in the direction where the event is going to occur. No more stupid "guesstimating" based on ground wind direction which can be very much erroneous. Many a flight the rocket is in some other place due to the vagaries of upper air windflows. If I see it fine, if not, look back at the map (or data screen) to see the rate of descent has slowed to the expected final descent rate. Next step is to go straight out, recover the rocket and get back to fly your next one. It's a great comfortable way to fly the out of sight screamers. Only have to worry about
CATO's and deployment failures. Even with a deployment failure, one stands a chance to get to where the remains are for shovel recovery. With a glass rocket in farm ground, one can just dig it out, replace the electronics and it's
good to go again. (As I found out one time)
One little tidbit: I've never been out to Black Rock but folks tell me to set your main deployment up relatively high because the playa sucks up Rf like a sponge. It's best to get some fixes up at altitude so you have better propagation and can establish a drift pattern before loss of signal. Kurt