darryl ramm's blog

Starting late 2010 the PowerFLARM traffic awareness and collision avoidance product will be available. This will be the first FLARM product available in the USA. Flarm is well proven technology overseas and this is very interesting for glider-on-glider and glider-on-towplane collision avoidance in the USA.

The PowerFLARM dimensions are

• Width: 96 mm / 3.8 inch
• Height: 46 mm / 1.8 inch
• Depth: 94 mm / 3.7 inch

I think the renderings on the PowerFLARM web site makes the unit look slightly larger that it will really be. And as other have pointed out people may be assuming the that slot on the front of the PowerFLARM is an SD card slot when it is a microSD slot. I was giving a talk a few months ago on collision avoidance technology (transponders, ADS-B, Flarm, etc.) and wanted to show the actual size of a PowerFLARM device. There are no devices available quite yet so I made a foam core model and took that along to the talk. I just a shape cut out on the table saw and glued an image from the PowerFLARM web site to the front face. (more…)

Schemp-Hirth is developing the new Arcus, a 20m flapped two seat glider based on the Duo Discus. I love the Duo Discus and the Arcus  looks very interesting. Schemp-Hirth say the airfoil for the Arcus is developed by Dr. Werner Würz and others contributed to the modified planform and winglets. There is some of the kind of pointless “Is it a flapped Duo Discus? Is is not?” discussion on r.a.s. Well it’s a 20m flapped double seater based on the Duo Discus XL with tweaked/modified airfoils and planform etc. Like nobody is going to just be crazy enough to take the exiting Duo and just cut flaps into the airfoil. It’s going to be changed and the aerodynamics updated. Is a “flapped Duo Discus”?  You bet, and that would be pretty good marketing to leverage off all us Duo Discus lovers.

Anyhow  I pasted Schemp-Hirth’s artists renderings for the Arcus and Duo Discus XL over each other and you can see the large version PDF if you click on the image above.  This of course depends on the accuracy of the artist renderings Schemp-Hirth uses in marketing materials.

I gave a talk on February 28th on FAI Badges at Williams Soaring as a part of the Valley Soaring Association winter seminar series. Here are the slides in PDF format.

I repeated this talk with slightly updated slides, at a Bay Area Soaring Associates (BASA) meeting on March 26th. Here are the PDF slides from the BASA talk

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Since I was playing earlier SeeYou Mobile simulator and also with the new SeeYou Mobile release candidate running on a real iPAQ 310 I decided to make an iPAQ 310 skin for the simulator.  The simulator is currently the older SeeYou Mobile 3.0 release and not the version designed for PNAs, Naviter confirmed they will be updating the simulator to pick up all those UI changes later, for now it is quite usable however and the large 800×480 screen works  very nicely.

The skin is based on  a photograph of my iPAQ 310 with some Photoshop cleanup work. There are up, down and enter buttons added on the top right hand edge that do the same as the iPAQ scroll wheel, and the power button will turn the simulator off.

I was hoping that the SeeYou Simulator might support transparency/alpha to allow a nice rounded shape but (after wasting time trying) I checked with Naviter who confirmed it does not.

Here is the Bigscreen_310.zip bundle, it installs the same as in my previous post.

After suggesting to other pilots on the ASH-26E owners forum that the Naviter SeeYou Mobile Simulator is not that useful I actually started to play with it more than I had done before and I have changed my opinion, it is pretty nice to play with and handy for testing out stuff. I’ve also hacked the simulator to run in a custom skin with an 800 x 480 pixel resolution, shown in the screen shot above (click on the image to see it full size). Below I’ll provide the files to do this.

[Note: I've updated this with a skin with the additional iPAQ PDA buttons for Calendar, Contacts, Mail and iTask. However  I am still having problems understanding the simulator behavior with these buttons. See notes below.] (more…)

It’s winter, but I’m flying out of Truckee in the Sierra Nevada mountains on an amazing day, it seems like the middle of summer. I self-launched from Truckee Airport in my new Antares 20E. I’m now around 16,000′ just South West of Truckee airport heading towards Mount Rose. I have the amazing vista of Lake Tahoe off to my right. I decide to head across the Carson valley to the Pine Nut mountains, and reach over to my PDA and change my destination waypoint to Mineral Peak, …. slap. Oh no, it’s all just a simulation.

So here is the setup. The Silent Wings soaring simulator is running on a MacBook Pro and driving a iPAQ hx4700 PDA running SeeYou Mobile. The NMEA (GPS) data to drive  SeeYou Mobile is coming from the (simulated) Cambridge 302 in the (unfortunately just simulated) Antares 20E glider I’m flying. The NMEA data is traveling over a Bluetooth serial link between the MacBook Pro and iPAQ PDA. Once set up properly all I need to do is just start Silent Wings on the Mac and SeeYou Mobile on the PDA and they just talk to each other. SeeYou Mobile works like normal, and you can even record an IGC flight trace on the PDA. But getting to this point can be a little involved. I tried  describing this to people and then realized I really need to write it down in painful detail. So sorry for the length, but here goes…

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I like my Cambridge 302 electronic vario/logger, however there is a bug in the Cambridge 302 where flight logs are apparently OK but the security record is invalid. What I describe here is a way to use SeeYou Mobile running on a PDA connected to the 302 to clear the memory log to avoid recurrence of the problem.

If your 302 has this problem it does not matter if you download the flight trace using the Cambridge “300 Utility” software on a PDA or a Windows PC, or the Datacam2 and Valicam2 MS-DOS utilities, or something like Naviter ConnectMe or SeeYou. All files downloaded will have invalid digital signatures. If you have this problem the Cambridge utilities will show a “Security Fail” error when the download completes.

The problem is apparently related to the flight log memory filling up and wrapping around, and overwriting previous traces, which it is supposed to do. However when this happens the calculated log signatures (IGC G-records) seem to be incorrect, even though the flight trace data itself is valid. This makes the IGC flight trace useless for FAI badge, record and Online Contest purposes. This may not affect all 302s or maybe not affect them each time the memory wraps, but if you do see this problem all your future flight traces will also be invalid. The workaround is to erase the flight log memory, at least then future flight traces will be valid, however of course this means you loose any current flight traces. I’ve had this happen to two different  302 varios and in both cases, clearing log memory made the problem go away.

As a preventative measure then it seems a good idea with a Cambridge 302 to periodically erase flight log memory before it has a chance to fill up. It may also be a good idea to run a lower log rate so the memory fills up less rapidly.

The only way to clear the memory is to attach a terminal emulator to the 302 serial port, type CTRL-C to put the port in command mode and at the cmd> prompt  type CLEAR LOG.

I fly with Naviter SeeYou Mobile and the nice thing is it is possible to clear the 302 log memory using the simple terminal emulator built into SeeYou Mobile. So there is no need to run a separate terminal emulator program or connect a laptop with HyperTerminal etc.

To get started connect the PDA to the Cambridge 302 and make sure they are talking to each other (you get the “Cambridge 302 Connected” pop-up message  on the main SeeYou Mobile screen). Then in SeeYou Mobile go to Settings>Hardware>Terminal. This Terminal screen is shown in the screenshots on this page. Click on the the keyboard icon, this will let you type a string into the top text field. Then click on the Send button to actualy send this string to the Cambridge 302.

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I have wanted to try flying a large wingspan open class glider for a while and now that the Williams Soaring Center has an ASH-25 “25H” available for rent I had to try it out. ASH-25s can have different wing tip/winglet options, and 25H as I flew it has a wingspan of 25.6 m. That’s 84 feet, or about three quarters of the wingspan of a Boeing 737 jet. The ASH-25 has an about a 60:1 glide ratio. For the mental arithmetic impaired, that means a theoretical glide range of about 110 miles from a height of 10,000 feet.

I flew with Kenny Price the instructor at Williams Soaring Center. Kenny has lots of time instructing and mentoring in ASH-25s. I really just wanted to see what flying such a large glider felt like and we only had time for two flights but I got the bug flying it so I’ll finish doing the rest of a checkout with Kenny as I get time.

The undercarriage in the ASH-25 is only lockable from the front seat. The rear seat passenger/pilot can assist moving the heavy gear with their undercarriage lever, this is similar as the original Duo Discus, something fixed in the Duo Discus X and XL.

The front seat is very comfortable, and high off the ground. You are sitting fairly reclined with a great view because of the low cut canopy rail. This reminded me of my DG-303 glider cockpit. The elevator trim indicator is on the right side of the cockpit, where in my ASH-26E it is on the left side, so I was always looking in the wrong place for the trim indicator.

It turns out this is the only glider I’ve flow with a CG tow hook, I’ve just been lucky and all other gliders I’ve flown have had a nose hook. Two reminders from Kenny to remember to pick up any dropped wing (should it occur) with rudder and not to let the glider balloon. With all that wing on the glider, pilots new to the ASH-25 apparently often have problems with it ballooning up behind the towplane as it starts to fly. I was probably overly worried about this and held the glider down too long on the first take off. Once I relaxed things got better quickly. On the second take off off it did drop the left wing a little and some right rudder brought it up.

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I had a great early season soaring flight out of Williams Soaring Center on March 1st, with an over 4 hour, 460km flight along foothills on the eastern edge of the Mendocino Mountain range. This was a chance to try out my SPOT Satellite Messenger again. The SPOT messenger is capable of sending manual “OK” and emergency messages my interest is using the messenger in “SPOTcast” mode where position reports (latitude, longitude and time, but not altitude) are sent automatically every 10 minutes.

SPOTcast messages are available on the SPOT website but unlike the manually sent messages they cannot be sent through email or SMS messaging. There is no ability to preview the web site before you purchase a SPOT so people often believe the SPOT web site can do a lot more than it currently does, and for example people assume that the SPOTcast messages get automatically displayed on a map and updated as new position reports come in. What is actually available is much simpler, current SPOTcast messages are displayed in a table, you select the ones you want plotted and click a button to plot on a Google map. See images of this user interface in my previous blog post on SPOT.

The SPOT messenger appeared to work flawlessly, as it has previously. An interesting recent addition to the SPOT website allows the SPOTcast reported locations to be saved in Google Earth kml file or GPS Exchange (GPX) formats. If you are interested in playing with this in Google Earth, here is spot_messages.kml the file containing the SPOTcast position reports from the SPOT web site and 831c4fv1.kml the kml flight trace produced from my flight logger submission to the OnlineContest (OLC). Just open both files in the same Google Earth session and you should see them overlaid as in the large screen shot image linked to the thumbnail above. In Google Earth you can click on each square “Track” point to show the corresponding time and latitude and longitude coordinates.

I’m still on my first set of Energizer AA Lithium batteries after several flights of several hours each. So while I’d have prefered the ability to use external 12 volts DC power, it does not look like battery life is an issue.

This year’s Soaring Society of America (SSA) Convention is in Albuquerque, NM, with main sessions running Thursday February 14th to Saturday February 17th.

I was working on what I wanted to see at the convention and arranging some side meetings and I ended up taking the convention schedule from the SSA Web site and reformatting it into an Excel spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet can generate a tab separated text file suitable for importing into Microsoft Outlook or to be printed or saved as a PDF. I’ve attached all formats here. In my case all I care about is having the schedule in my iPhone, I import the tab separated file into Outlook and then synch my iPhone to Outlook.

SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_1.xls (Microsoft Excel spreadsheet)
SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_1.pdf (One page schedule printed from spreadsheet)
SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_1.txt (Tab delimited text file saved from spreadsheet)

An example of how to import the tab delimited text file into Microsoft Outlook using the Import and Export Wizard is show below. This was tested with Outlook 2003 but other Outlook versions should work similarly.

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