So there is still a little bit left to do here, but let me explain my datapath from before this board was created. The board has a 7805, filtering caps, reset button, APC220, and ESP8266. And a few extra RF goodies laying around it.

The old datapath was as follows:

1. Telemetry serial stream generated from altimeter's onboard microcontroller
2. Transmitted from the avionics bay through a APC220 70cm transiever
3. Received by the 6 element yagi, into my ground station's APC220
4. Serial stream piped to the laptop from a translation microcontroller

The new ground station board follows the same path, but extends it to:

1. Telemetry serial stream generated from altimeter's onboard microcontroller
2. Transmitted from the avionics bay through a APC220 70cm transiever
3. Received by the 6 element yagi, into my ground station's APC220
4. Serial stream into the ESP8266 WiFi microcontroller
5. Cell phone acesses the data stream via a WiFi telnet session

This allows me to not have to haul around the laptop unless I want to, plus I can now control everything from my cellphone. How cool is that?

The next step is to put it all into a real box.