Kurt,
Your posts are too long man! I am sure that they're filled with a lot of information, but I'm saying that the AIM Xtra, tablet, and a Garmin Etrex or smart phone mapping app make for a very easy to use tracking system. Fly rocket, enter last coordinate into Etrex, go to rocket.
I don't necessarily care about caching maps, having a GPS in the base tablet, or any of that. I use it purely as a receiver. It works to our waiver, hence my sharing my experience.
As long as you can input data into your Etrex and your rocket is nearby the last known position, you will usually be able to find the rocket. The extreme situation is where a rocket drifts for a few miles and there is a premature loss of signal.
One's last received position might be quite a distance away from the landing site. If you carry your tracker with you and are within the ground footprint of the tracker, you'll get a new position to guide you as long as it has a satellite lock.
The edge with live map tracking is with a bread crumb track on a map screen, you can see the drift trend as the rocket was at lower altitude before loss of signal (LOS). You get to the LOS site and no rocket or no signal you proceed in the
direction your map suggests to reacquire the signal for final recovery. You track by last known position in your Etrex and you might be in a situation if your receiver isn't picking up a new position.
True, with most rockets coming down in 1.5 miles you'll be able to input into your Etrex and go right to and if it's not there, it's nearby so always carry your receiver with you.
John Beans of Jolly Logic fame is exploring a GPS mesh technology where one has a tracking transceiver. There is no transmitter or receiver the device does both. Would need a minimum of two and this is the funky part. My rocket goes out of range and I have
a last known position on my ground transceiver. Your rocket with one of his mesh transceivers say flies over my rocket and communicates with tracker and relays it's position back to the receiver at the launchsite.
Your rocket flying over will have a better fix on the final position flying on high.
Could also put a transceiver on a tethered balloon so it's up in the air 100 feet or more. It can "see" more of the ground from up there so a rocket on the ground out of range of a ground based transceiver can be "heard" from up there and the position
relayed back down to "base"
Another scenario is put one of these mesh transceivers on a Drone and fly it out up high to where one thinks an errant rocket went. If it receives a position from the "grounded/lost" rocket being up high and with better radio propagation it can
send the downed rockets position back to the launchsite base.
Even though the current state of GPS tracking is sufficient for 95% of us this "mesh" setup would make it darn near impossible to lose one's rocket as long as the device doesn't lose power or come in ballistic way out of range.
Heck, people have posted pictures of ballistic rockets sticking out of the ground where the GPS died, but not before it got out a few positions before it hit. I had one of those and with a glass rocket maybe new electronics, nosecone and back in business.
In my case, I would not have found it without the GPS tracker as the rocket completely disappeared. It did not land that far away either.
Sorry for being wordy but I'm getting excited of the prospect of a simpler live map tracking system anyone can use instead of all the gobbly-gook I've had to do. I'll tell you it's about as close to worry free flying as you can get as long
as you don't get a CATO or in flight failure. Finding it becomes the easier part of the flight so you can get it and fly the next one. Kurt