Manual / Environment and Units
Environment and Units
Air is half the trajectory. Wrist Dope reads it for you — pressure, temperature, altitude, humidity — and every one of those four fields can be taken off the sensors and typed in by hand instead. What matters most is the third thing this page does: it tells you, out loud, when a number on screen is not a reading.
AUTO
Sensors and Apple Weather. Part of Wrist Dope Pro.
MANUAL
Type it yourself. Free, on every tier.
The triangle
Nothing measured this field. Tap it to find out why.
Every row states its value and its mode. Altitude here has an orange triangle and a dash — nothing has measured it yet.
Step 1
Four fields, four sources
On iPhone this is the ENV/SET page. On Apple Watch it is the Environment page, two swipes right of Live Fire. Four fields drive the air your bullet flies through:
- Pressure — the barometer, as station pressure. Not the sea-level number an aviation report gives you.
- Temperature — Apple Weather. No wrist-worn device measures air temperature honestly; it measures you.
- Altitude — the watch barometer, or GPS on iPhone.
- Humidity — Apple Weather.
The sensors ON chip at the top right says the feed is running. While the page is open the numbers stream live and unsmoothed so you can watch them move and see the data is real.
On the watch, tap a field to flip it between AUTO and MAN, then turn the Crown to set the value.
Step 2
AUTO reads it, MANUAL is yours
Each field carries its own switch, so you can leave three on the sensors and type the fourth.
- iPhone — tap the
AUTOchip to make the rowMANUAL. A−/+pair and a number field appear under it; type straight into the field if you have a Kestrel reading to copy. - Apple Watch — tap the field to flip it, then turn the Digital Crown to set the value. No keyboard, by design.
Refresh weather forces an immediate pull rather than waiting for the next poll. Use it when you have walked out of the trees and back into signal.
Typing conditions in by hand is free for everyone. Letting the app read them for you — the sensors, Apple Weather and the refresh button — is part of Wrist Dope Pro. Accuracy is never the thing behind the upgrade: the engine is the same engine either way.
The same triangle rides the Live Fire and range-card headers, beside the density altitude the solution used.
Step 3
The orange triangle means “not a reading”
A field on AUTO that nothing has actually measured does not quietly show you a plausible number. It shows the stand-in and marks it:
- Altitude gets a dash. Zero feet is a claim about where you are standing; a dash is the absence of one.
- Temperature, pressure and humidity fall back to the ICAO standard atmosphere — 59 °F, 29.92 inHg, 50% — and your solution is honestly computed against those until the real ones arrive.
Tap the triangle and the sheet tells you which source is missing and why. If Location was never asked for, its button asks for real. If you denied it, the button opens this app's page in Settings, because from there iOS will never show the prompt again. Either sheet also offers to drop that one row into MANUAL with the value already filled in, ready for you to correct.
Leave the row on AUTO while you wait. The real conditions take over on their own the moment there is a fix and a signal.
Density altitude sits under the four fields. The UNITS block is directly below it.
Step 4
Density altitude, and your units
Density altitude is the one number that folds pressure, temperature and humidity into a single reading of how thick the air is. It is derived from true air density, not from your elevation, so it changes on a hot afternoon at a range that has not moved.
The readout here is the live one. The DA printed in the Live Fire and range-card headers is the density altitude your current solution was actually computed with, so the two can differ slightly while the air settles. The header is the one that matches your holds.
Units start with one switch: Imperial or Metric. Everything follows it — yards or metres, mph or m/s, °F or °C, inHg or hPa, feet or metres, ft/s or m/s. Under it, each unit can be overridden on its own, so metres and mph together is a perfectly ordinary setting.
MIL and MOA are not here. Scope units belong to the rifle, not to you, and live on the gun in the Guns tab. Your unit settings sync between iPhone and Apple Watch.
Why wind isn't on this page
Pressure, temperature, altitude and humidity are facts a device can measure. Wind is a judgement you make by looking at grass, mirage and flags between you and the target, and it is different at 400 yards than it is at your feet. So it lives on the Field page, where you commit it deliberately, and never in a list of sensor readings.
The station wind Apple Weather reports does appear beside your wind call — clearly labelled, as a sanity check. It never feeds a solution.
Conditions look wrong?
- Altitude is a dash, or the temperature reads 59 °F. Nothing has measured them. Tap the orange triangle on the row — it names the missing source and offers the fix. Location access being off is the usual answer.
- The pressure disagrees with the airport. Aviation reports quote sea-level-corrected pressure. Wrist Dope wants station pressure, the real weight of air where you are standing. At elevation those two numbers are supposed to differ, by a lot.
- Temperature matches your body, not the range. A wrist device sits in your sleeve. Wrist Dope takes temperature from Apple Weather for exactly this reason, but a station some miles off is still a station some miles off. If you carry a Kestrel, put that row on MANUAL and type its reading.
- A field won't go back to AUTO. Switching a row into AUTO turns the sensor feed on, and that is the Pro side of the line. Manual entry stays available on every tier.
- Nothing updates. Pressure and altitude move almost continuously; temperature and humidity arrive on the weather poll, roughly every few minutes. Tap
Refresh weatherrather than waiting.
Going deeper: How Wrist Dope reads the air explains what the app does with these four numbers, and Skip the weather log covers how much of it is worth chasing.
Still stuck? support@wristdope.com