Recon¶
Recon turns your aircraft into a sensor: fly over hostile ground, run a scan, and every enemy unit your line-of-sight can reach is drawn on the F10 map — shaped by category, coloured by side. It is a reveal-and-mark tool for enemy contacts only. Friendly assets (FOBs you own, logistic zones, radio beacons) are never shown here; they live in their own menus.
What Recon lets you do¶
You pick which categories of contact you care about (infantry, vehicles, air defense, aircraft, helicopters, ships, enemy FARP/FOB), start a scan, and CTLD paints icons on the F10 map for everything currently in your line of sight. While the scan is running it auto-refreshes on a timer, so contacts appear, move and drop off the map as the picture changes. The marks are yours alone — they are drawn for your coalition only.
How it works¶
- Line of sight. A scan only reveals enemy units your aircraft can actually see. Terrain, the horizon and the scan radius all limit what comes back — fly higher or closer to see more.
- Minimum altitude. You must be above the configured minimum AGL altitude to scan. Too low and CTLD refuses with a message.
- Auto-refresh. Starting a scan also arms an auto-refresh timer. On each tick CTLD re-scans and updates the map: new contacts get an icon, contacts that moved are re-drawn at their new position, contacts that died or dropped out of sight are removed.
- Layers drive the picture. Only categories whose layer is active produce marks. You can toggle layers before or during a scan; toggling while a scan is live re-scans immediately, so switching a layer off wipes its marks at once.
Activation¶
The Recon menu lives at F10 → CTLD → RECON. If you do not see it, recon is not enabled for the mission — that is a mission-maker setting (see the Mission Maker guide).
RECON [Start] / RECON [Stop]¶
Utility: A single toggle. RECON [Start] runs an immediate line-of-sight scan around your aircraft, marks every detected enemy in your active layers, and arms auto-refresh. Once running, the same entry becomes RECON [Stop], which halts the refresh and clears all your recon marks from the map.
Requirements: you must be at or above the minimum AGL altitude. You can start a scan with no layers active — CTLD tells you to activate layers to see targets — then switch layers on without restarting.
Activation: F10 → CTLD → RECON → RECON [Start] (then RECON [Stop] to end).
Layer toggles¶
Utility: Show or hide one category of contact. Each layer has its own entry whose label
tells you what a click will do — [activate] when the layer is off, [deactivate] when it
is on. A trailing (X) means recon is currently idle (no active scan), so the toggle only
records your choice for the next start. Turning a layer off during a live scan removes its
marks immediately.
Activation: F10 → CTLD → RECON → [layer name] [activate] / [deactivate]
Available layers, in menu order:
- Infantry
- Air Defense (AA)
- Ground Vehicles
- Helicopters
- Aircraft
- Ships
- FARP / FOB
Layers and icons¶
Each layer draws a distinct shape so you can read the category at a glance, while the icon colour follows the detected unit's side — red for RED, blue for BLUE, grey for neutral.
| Layer | Icon |
|---|---|
| Infantry | Circle with a cross |
| Air Defense (AA) | Filled circle with an apex (^) |
| Ground Vehicles | Rectangle with a diagonal |
| Helicopters | Circle with two vertical bars (H) |
| Aircraft | Cross with a centre dot |
| Ships | Elongated rectangle with a bow arrow |
| FARP / FOB | T inside a square |
Icons scale with map zoom
Recon icons are drawn in world space (metres on the ground), so they grow and shrink as you zoom the F10 map — this is a DCS limitation, there is no screen-fixed alternative. The mission-maker can set an overall icon size multiplier.
Notes¶
- Recon marks are per-player and visible to your coalition only.
- Scan radius, minimum altitude, refresh interval and icon size are all mission-maker configuration — see the Mission Maker guide.