Question about over the "horizon" relay. Does that need an end-user interaction like setting a parameter or is it completely transparent? I know this sounds callous but if one is only interested in "their" rocket and no one else's, are they going to see
everyone else's Featherweight GPS on their receive end that may very well be "beeping" away their respective locations from the prep area at a large launch? This is somewhat "mootish" if the device saves the positions onboard for later download and use but some of the selfish paranoids out there might not want to "share".:wink: Shame on them!!:no: Kurt
The plan is for it to be transparent. About a half second every transmit cycle is dedicated to having the tracker listen for "lost" trackers and for the ground stations to communicate with other other ground stations what channel it's using. This will happen in the background and won't interfere with one user's tracking of his own rocket.
If you want to see what other Featherweight trackers are operating in the vicinity, you can pull that up on a separate page. This and the public information features will be in future releases, so some details are still to be worked out. We could provide an option for a user to opt out of having his own rocket transmit on the lost rocket channel, but in general I won't want to add options willy-nilly because it complicates the user interface. Also, rocketry is fun, and people at rocket launches, with few exceptions, are all on the same "team". So I'd actually rather not have the user interface in effect ask all the users if they want to be distrustful of their rocketry neighbors, even if a few distrustful users really want that feature.