I like recon, but it's not obvious how it works, and I've seen others in chat complain about issues getting it to work.
From the recon math here:
https://github.com/Yink059/DCS-Scripts/blob/main/recon.lua
You can map out where the average recon plane can see things:
The angle of your plane doesn't seem to affect the direction of the camera, it's just checked to make sure your plane is 'within tolerance'.
Also, there don't appear to be the equivalent of ray-casts from the plane to the terrain, it seems to calculate where the point on the terrain height-map is, and doesn't check if a mountain or something is in the way of your camera.
The actual target scan is done with a sphere on the target point, not a cylinder from space or a cone from the plane.
It's not super clear to me what the pulse rate it, but I think it might be 2 second delay after enabling, and then a pulse every half-second.
This all may or may not be accurate, I'm not sure if that script is the same version that's running on the server, and it's possible I overlooked some quirks of it, I didn't stare too long at it.
Hope that helps some other people who like recon but maybe had trouble figuring it out.