1 # Using Altus Metrum Products
5 First off, in the US, you need an [amateur radio license](../Radio) or
6 other authorization to legally operate the radio transmitters that are part
11 In the rocket itself, you just need a [TeleMetrum](../TeleMetrum) board and
12 a LiPo rechargeable battery. An 860mAh battery weighs less than a 9V
13 alkaline battery, and will run a [TeleMetrum](../TeleMetrum) for hours.
15 By default, we ship TeleMetrum with a simple wire antenna. If your
16 electronics bay or the airframe it resides within is made of carbon fiber,
17 which is opaque to RF signals, you may choose to have an SMA connector
18 installed so that you can run a coaxial cable to an antenna mounted
19 elsewhere in the rocket.
23 To receive the data stream from the rocket, you need an antenna and short
24 feedline connected to one of our [TeleDongle](../TeleDongle) units. The
25 TeleDongle in turn plugs directly into the USB port on a notebook
26 computer. Because TeleDongle looks like a simple serial port, your computer
27 does not require special device drivers... just plug it in.
29 Right now, all of our application software is written for Linux. However,
30 because we understand that many people run Windows or MacOS, we are working
31 on a new ground station program written in Java that should work on all
34 After the flight, you can use the RF link to extract the more detailed data
35 logged in the rocket, or you can use a mini USB cable to plug into the
36 TeleMetrum board directly. Pulling out the data without having to open up
37 the rocket is pretty cool! A USB cable is also how you charge the LiPo
38 battery, so you'll want one of those anyway... the same cable used by lots
39 of digital cameras and other modern electronic stuff will work fine.
41 If your rocket lands out of sight, you may enjoy having a hand-held GPS
42 receiver, so that you can put in a waypoint for the last reported rocket
43 position before touch-down. This makes looking for your rocket a lot like
44 Geo-Cacheing... just go to the waypoint and look around starting from there.
46 You may also enjoy having a ham radio "HT" that covers the 70cm band... you
47 can use that with your antenna to direction-find the rocket on the ground
48 the same way you can use a Walston or Beeline tracker. This can be handy
49 if the rocket is hiding in sage brush or a tree, or if the last GPS position
50 doesn't get you close enough because the rocket dropped into a canyon, or
51 the wind is blowing it across a dry lake bed, or something like that... Keith
52 and Bdale both currently own and use the
53 [Yaesu VX-6R](http://yaesu.com/indexVS.cfm?cmd=DisplayProducts&ProdCatID=111&encProdID=4C6F204F6FEBB5BAFA58BCC1C131EAC0&DivisionID=65&isArchived=0)
56 So, to recap, on the ground the hardware you'll need includes:
58 * an antenna and feedline
61 * optionally, a handheld GPS receiver
62 * optionally, an HT or receiver covering 435 Mhz
64 The best hand-held commercial directional antennas we've found for radio
65 direction finding rockets are from
66 [Arrow Antennas](http://www.arrowantennas.com/). The 440-3 and 440-5 are
67 both good choices for finding a TeleMetrum-equipped rocket when used with
70 Find more information about antennas, HTs, and getting a ham radio license
71 on our [Radio](../Radio) page.
75 Our software makes it easy to log the data from each flight, both the
76 telemetry received over the RF link during the flight itself, and the more
77 complete data log recorded in the DataFlash memory on the TeleMetrum
78 board. Once this data is on your computer, our postflight tools make it
79 easy to view a standard set of plots showing the altitude, acceleration, and
80 velocity of the rocket during flight. You can also export a data file useable
81 with Google Maps and Google Earth for visualizing the flight path in two or
84 Our ultimate goal is to emit a set of files for each flight that can be
85 published as a web page per flight, or just viewed on your local disk with
90 In the future, we intend to offer "companion boards" for the rocket that will
91 plug in to TeleMetrum to collect additional data, provide more pyro channels,
92 and so forth. A reference design for a companion board will be documented
93 soon, and will be compatible with open source Arduino programming tools.
95 We are also working on the design of a hand-held ground terminal that will
96 allow monitoring the rocket's status, collecting data during flight, and
97 logging data after flight without the need for a notebook computer on the
98 flight line. Particularly since it is so difficult to read most notebook
99 screens in direct sunlight, we think this will be a great thing to have.