Board · Operator guide
Setting up and running your dropzone board. Written to be read on a phone, one question at a time.
The board is a live display for your dropzone. Put it on a screen in the hangar or at manifest and it shows what's in the air, what's on the ground, and what's coming up.
Depending on what you turn on, it can show:
Everything except your board is off until you turn it on. A board you've never configured works exactly as it did the day you got it.
Open your board's page on whatever computer drives the display, then press F11 for full screen. That's it — it refreshes itself and keeps running.
You don't need to log in, and you don't need to touch it again. If the screen goes to sleep, that's the computer's power settings, not the board.
jumpslut.com/board/[your-dz-slug]
Tap CONFIGURE in the header and enter your PIN. Don't have one, or lost it? Get in touch.
You'll see five tabs:
| Tab | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Location | Where your landing area is |
| Aircraft | Your jump planes |
| Jump run | Exit altitude, run direction, offsets |
| Display | How the board looks and what it cycles through |
| Integrations | Your Burble link |
Location tab
Most boards start out pinned somewhere near your field but not on your landing area — often the airport's reference point, sometimes the address your dropzone is listed at. Until you fix that, the glide rings and jump run line are drawn around the wrong spot.
Aircraft tab
Type each jump plane's registration and add it. The board watches for those aircraft and highlights them on the map when they're flying.
If a plane never shows up, it's almost always the transponder. The board tracks aircraft through ADS-B (1090ES). Turbine jump planes have it. Some Cessna 182s and older piston aircraft have only a basic transponder, or US-only UAT ADS-B, and won't appear no matter what you do.
A better way to add a plane: with CONFIGURE unlocked, wait until it's flying and tap it on the map. That captures the aircraft's actual identity from a live signal, which is more reliable than typing a registration and hoping it matches. (Tapping does nothing while Configure is locked — that's deliberate, so nobody changes your aircraft from the hangar floor.)
Got a ship in for a boogie, or a lease for the season?
Before you add it, tick Temp aircraft and enter the date it's leaving — then type the registration and press Add. The board takes it off by itself when that date passes; you don't have to remember.
If it's still flying at your DZ on the day it was due to leave, you'll get a prompt asking whether to extend rather than losing it silently.
If the board says a tail is already active at another dropzone, that's usually right — a plane can only belong to one board permanently. If it's visiting you, add it as a temp aircraft instead.
Jump run tab
Two separate things live here, and they save differently — the section headings tell you which.
The altitude your loads normally climb to. The board uses it for the ETA countdown on an aircraft that's on its way up.
This sets the default — what the board starts on each morning. It saves when you click away from the field; there's no Save button in this section.
Anyone can change it for the day from the board itself, without the PIN, using the control next to the aircraft mode. That change lasts until the end of the day and then it's back to the default you set here. That control only appears when the board is in DZ Aircraft mode and you have at least one aircraft added — in Jump Run mode, or with no aircraft, there's nothing to show an ETA for and the control isn't there.
Run mode is either Into wind (default) or Fixed headings. Into wind means the board points the jump run line into the wind at exit altitude, which is what most DZs fly.
Fixed headings is for dropzones that can't. If you're under a shelf, next to a Class B, or restricted to a corridor, you fly the runs you're allowed to and take the best wind you can get. Enter up to four compass headings and the board picks whichever has the most headwind for the current wind.
Headings are 1 to 360, not 0 to 359 — due north is 360. Entering 360 and 180 gives you a north/south axis and the board picks whichever end suits the wind. Entering one heading means that direction only, every time. Repeats don't count twice — enter the same heading twice and it's stored once.
If the wind is close to perpendicular to every heading you allow, the board labels the line CROSSWIND RUN rather than pretending it found a good one.
Standing offset shifts the jump run line sideways by a fixed distance — for a DZ that always runs a half-mile off the field to stay out of something. Enter the distance in miles and pick a side: Left of run and Right of run rotate with whatever heading is being flown, while North / South / East / West stay put regardless.
The offset works on its own. You can run into wind and offset — you don't need fixed headings to use it.
Press Save. Nothing in the Airspace section saves until you do. Clear removes all of it and puts you back to plain into-wind.
None of this touches LAST RUN. The line showing where your aircraft actually flew is drawn from what it did, never from what you configured here.
Integrations tab
This is where you connect Burble, and it's what turns on everything that needs to know about your loads:
Without a link, none of those appear. Everything else — winds, aircraft, glide rings, jump run — works exactly the same. A dropzone that doesn't use Burble loses nothing it had.
To connect it: open your own public Burble manifest board, copy the address, and paste it in. The number on its own works too if that's what you have.
Then press Test this link. The board fetches it and shows you what it found, so a wrong number is caught here rather than on the wall.
Unlink disconnects it. Your aircraft, settings and rotation are untouched; the loads-related views simply stop appearing.
Display tab
This is the one thing worth understanding properly.
Until you publish, everything you set in Configure is saved only in the browser you set it in. Your phone has one copy. The wall display has its own. The laptop at manifest has a third. They can quietly disagree, and the wall — the screen everyone actually looks at — is usually the one nobody has configured.
Publishing fixes that. It takes the settings from the screen you're on and makes them the dropzone's settings, so every screen shows the same thing.
Two things to know:
Once you've published, any other screen picks up the dropzone's settings the next time it loads, and tells you once that it's done so, with a list of what changed.
Display tab → Rotation
The board can cycle between views instead of showing one thing all day.
Set how many seconds each one stays up. A good starting point is DZ Board 45 seconds, Loads 30.
Press Save when you're done — rotation changes don't save on their own.
If there's nothing to show, the board skips it. No loads manifested? The Loads view is passed over and your board stays up. You won't get thirty seconds of an empty screen. Configure tells you when a view has nothing in it, so you can tell the difference between “not working” and “nothing on right now”.
Turn nothing on and the board simply shows your board, exactly as before.
Display tab → Full-screen call takeover
Turn this on and the board goes full screen at each call — 20, 15, 10 and 5 minutes — for 25 seconds, then returns to whatever was showing.
If two loads are counting down at once, the more urgent call wins the screen. A 5-minute call is never pushed aside by a 15-minute one. The second call waits its turn, and is dropped if its own load goes before it gets the screen.
This needs your Burble link, since that's where calls come from.
Open the board on your phone and tap LOADS in the header. You get the full manifest, full screen.
It goes back on its own after 30 seconds — any tap resets that. If a call fires while you're looking, the call takes the screen and gives you your remaining time back afterwards.
This is for phones, tablets and laptops. The wall display has nobody tapping it, so it just carries on.
What the numbers and colours on the board itself mean — the same guide as the ? HELP button on the board.
360 and 180 for a strictly north/south-only DZ. The board then picks the allowed heading with the most headwind for the predictive line, and labels it CROSSWIND RUN when the wind is near-perpendicular to every allowed heading (so the operator sees the honest picture instead of pretending it's into-wind). An optional Standing offset (distance + side) shifts the chord's anchor — useful when the run has to sit a fixed distance off the field (e.g. Zephyrhills under Tampa Class B runs N/S with a standing offset). The default stays Into wind, and the vast majority of DZs never touch this. Never changes the last-actual (observed) run line.Tell us what the board did and what you expected instead. Screenshots of the screen help more than anything.