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