Beacons¶
Radio beacons are deployable navigation aids you drop from your aircraft. Each beacon transmits on three frequencies at once — one you can home on with your ADF needle, plus a UHF and an FM channel — so any coalition aircraft can find the spot you marked: a landing zone, a rendezvous, a forward site, whatever you need to point people at.
Every beacon runs on a battery. Once it is flat the beacon shuts itself down and disappears, so you do not have to police old beacons cluttering the airspace.
Deploying a beacon¶
Utility: Marks your current position with a navigation beacon the whole coalition can tune and home to.
How it works: CTLD spawns the beacon at your aircraft and picks three free frequencies for it — a VHF (ADF) channel, a UHF channel and an FM channel, all unique so no two active beacons collide. Transmission starts about a second after the drop. The coalition gets a text message with the assigned frequencies, for example:
Navigation beacon deployed - 245.00 kHz - 350.50 / 45.20 MHz
On the ground the beacon is placed a few metres behind your aircraft so the ground unit does not spawn inside you; airborne, it drops at your position.
Activation: F10 → CTLD → Radio Beacons → Drop Beacon
Removing a beacon¶
Utility: Takes down a beacon you no longer need.
How it works: CTLD removes the closest friendly beacon within 500 m of your aircraft — it stops the transmissions and deletes the beacon. Fly near the one you want gone before calling it. If nothing friendly is within range you get "No Radio Beacons within 500m."
Activation: F10 → CTLD → Radio Beacons → Remove Closest Beacon
Listing beacons¶
Utility: Shows every active beacon for your coalition, with its name and frequencies, so you can read back a channel without hunting for the original drop message.
Activation: F10 → CTLD → Radio Beacons → List Beacons
The frequencies¶
Each beacon broadcasts on three channels simultaneously:
| Channel | Band | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| VHF | low frequency, shown in kHz | The ADF (NDB) channel — swing your automatic direction-finding needle onto it to home in. |
| UHF | shown in MHz | Silent carrier (no audio tone), intended for FC3-style aircraft. |
| FM | shown in MHz | Audible tone; supports FM homing on aircraft that have it. |
The frequency string always reads VHF kHz - UHF / FM MHz (e.g. 245.00 kHz - 350.50 /
45.20 MHz). Frequencies are assigned automatically — you cannot pick them from the cockpit.
Audio requires embedded sound files
The beacon tones only play if the mission has the beacon sound files embedded. If you hear silence on the VHF and FM channels, that is a mission setup matter, not a fault on your end — see the Mission Maker guide. The ADF needle can still react to the beacon even when no tone is heard.
Battery life¶
A dropped beacon lasts for its battery life — 30 minutes by default. When the battery runs out (or the beacon's units are destroyed), CTLD automatically stops the transmissions and removes it; its frequencies are freed for reuse. The mission maker can change the battery duration — see the Mission Maker guide.
The beacon map layer¶
When the mission has the beacon map layer enabled, active beacons are drawn on the F10 map as coloured circle icons, each labelled with the beacon name and its MGRS coordinates. The layer keeps itself current: new drops are added, and icons for expired or removed beacons are erased automatically. Whether the layer is on, and its colours and refresh rate, are set by the mission — see the Mission Maker guide.
For revealing and marking detected units (rather than your own beacons) on the F10 map, see Recon.