darryl ramm's blog

I’ll write up some more comprehensive comments on the SPOT satellite messenger soon, but in the meantime I wanted to provide some screen shots of the SPOT web site showing what is available from the optional SPOT Track Progress service from SPOT. Overall I’m impressed by the SPOT messenger and I will be using it in my glider, particularly when flying in remote areas to automatically track my location and as a supplement to my existing McMurdo Personal Locator Beacon (PLB). I purchased my SPOT messenger from my local REI store, it is also available at REI online.

SPOT is a subsidiary of Globalstar, the satellite phone company. The SPOT satellite messenger has an internal GPS receiver and sends the GPS coordinates and message type info via the Globalstar L-band simplex data network. Message types available are an automatic tracking message, or manually triggered events – a “911″ distress alert, a less severe “help” message or just an “OK” message.

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I love it when companies do creative “in your face” marketing, particuarly when it is creative enough to spread by word of mouth and hey if you can also have fun tweaking the competition then all the better. Having done my share of things like this I really found the following move by Alexander Schleicher against DG Flugzeugbau, two of the leading German sailplane manufactures, pretty funny.

Schleicher make the ASH-26E motorglider I fly, DG make the nice DG-1000S two seat glider I’ve enjoyed flying as a member of BASA (Bay Area Soaring Associates) and they designed the DG-303 sailplane I used to own. Hugh Milne a fellow Californian ASH-26E pilot returns from visiting friends in Germany and forwarded the photos here and this story.

In Spring 2007 DG delivered a new DG-1000S sailplane to HVL (Hamburger Verein für Luftfahrt), one of the largest Hamburg soaring clubs. With new sailplanes this normally involves a long wait, eager anticipation and exchange of lots of money. But the club members do not like the brown trim stripes on this glider. I’m not sure who specified brown, it’s a pretty unusual color for glider trim, anyhow the club members did not like the color. Since the club really wants their sailplane, they accept it, but have contacts at Alexander Schleicher and so drive it across Germany to the Schleicher factory in Poppenhausen so they can replace the trim on their competitor’s brand new sailplane.

Schleicher replaced the standard DG trim stripes with the latest style of their own distinctive “swoosh” underneath the canopies and added a little sign on the tail, which I am told means “With the best friendly greetings from Poppenhausen”. I think the Schleicher swoosh looks a lot better and more modern than the usual plain DG trim strips. Schleicher apparently charged about 300 Euros to cover the cost of materials. I bet the Schleicher factory had fun doing this.

I have heard from a HVL club member who flies the DG-1000S in contests etc. that it often takes other pilots quite a while to realize what is different with this glider.

There are photos of this DG-1000S online on the HVL club website.

The DG-1000S is a good glider, and by the way if you are a glider pilot and live in the San Francisco Bay Area, BASA have both a DG-1000S and DG-505 in their club fleet.

[This post has been corrected, only the trim was repainted, the base white paint on the DG-1000S was fine, and there was only one DG-1000S delivered. Photo credits. Copyright Hugh Milne, DG-1000S with new paint trim. Eckbert Andresen DG-1000S with brown trim. Used with Permission.]

I did a self launch endorsement this week with Rolf Peterson. Flying out of Byron airport in Rolf’s Grob 109B. We also flew over to Tracy and shot some touch and go landings there.

Besides covering motor glider specific things, the training was a great general early season warm up and Rolf really helped me brush up my skills. The endorsement is required by the FAA and by my insurance company but since motor gliders vary so much I need more than a generic motorglider endorsement in a Grob 109 for handling a retracting engine motorglider like my ASH-26E. I’ll be working with the team at Williams Soaring on that ASH-26E specific training and sign off.

Since the Grob 109 is a three wheel taildragger with break away castering tail wheel it handles similar to Citabrias, Piper Cubs or other taildragger powered aircraft. I went and read The Compleat Taildragger Pilot (Amazon or PilotMall) which seems to be the training book prefered by many taildragger instructors, including Rolf. I also picked up a copy of Taildragger Tactics by Spark Imeson (know for writing The Mountain Flying Bible). Taildragger Tactics covers more than just tail dragger handling, from cold weather operation to tie-downs. Both books seem really good. I’ll be even more respectful next time I see tow pilots kissing the ground with a wheel landing in a Pawnee.

The Grob 109, it is a relatively low performance glider but it is a sweet toy. Since it is a touring style motorglider, transitions between powered and glider flight are easy and the Grob 109 is capable of higher speed cruise flight than motor gliders with a retractable pylons.

An added bonus was that Rolf’s hangar is next to one that houses Airshows America. So we popped our heads in there and admired their L-39s, MIG-17s, Pitts Special, and other toys.

My ASH-26E was delivered to the port in Germany and should be on the ship by now. Uli Kremmer of Alexander Schleicher personally delivered it to the port, now that’s service. The instrument panel looks great, I was worried whether everything would fit or not. The only problem I can see was the paint swoosh on the fuselage was supposed to be curved and ended up straight.

I’m curious about the high tech looking tail lights on the Cobra trailer. All Cobra trailers I’ve seen used old style incandescent tail lights and I’ve had problems with water leaking into the trailer through the old style lights, casuing me to replace the lights on my current trailer with LED truck tail lights. I’m hoping these new tail lights mean I don’t need to do that with the new trailer.

It is just about the start of another soaring season so I’ve had my glider annual inspection performed and getting other things ready including having my emergency parachute repacked. While doing that I also dropped of some of BASA’s (my gliding club) parachutes for a repack.

Emergency parachutes have to be repacked every 120 days. This allows an inspection of the condition of the parachute and case, and internal items such a the rubber bands that hold the parachute lines in place. I have my parachute repacked by Allen Silver at Silver Parachute. Allen is a FAA master parachute rigger, an aerobatic pilot and specializes in repacks of parachutes for glider and aerobatic pilots. He has several thousand parachute jumps under his belt, I have none and will be happy to keep it that way.

Anybody who uses an emergency parachute should attend one of Allen’s talks on care and use of emergency parachutes, get your parachute harness adjusted properly by Allen and do an ‘executive repack’ where he walks through doing a repack on your chute while you are there. That way you’ll learn a lot about the parachute and whats inside the pack.

One thing that Allen encourages before a repack, and I always do, is to put your parachute on go though the steps of a simulated bail out (protect your face/head, eject canopy, release harness, fight your way out of the cockpit, head first over the side if possible, look for and grab the ripcord, keep your legs together if you can, pull the ripcord, throw away the ripcord handle, look up and grab the steering handles, etc…). You can see me pulling the ripcord in the top photo on the left. The coil spring loaded pilot chute is flying out of the pack. The other photos show Allen holding the pilot chute, the parachute steering handles (gold colored in this case), and the rubber bands holding the parachute risers in place in the pack.

Allen has several articles on emergency parachute use and care available here.

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I purchased a Clarity Aloft headset for use in my motor glider. The Clarity Aloft is a passive in-ear headset that uses Comply brand foam earbud tips to provide great noise isolation.

The switch box on the Clarity Aloft has a master volume control, an 2.5mm stereo audio jack for auxilary input for music or cell phone and a stereo/mono switch. Since it is entirely passive there is no radio mute on the auxilary input. The headset looks well made and is comfortable to wear, even while wearing sunglasses and an oxygen cannula hooked over my ears. I think the headset will just hang over my neck when not in use.

Some people hate how in-ear style phones feel, but I already have several very nice phones from Etymotic Research for music listing (middle photo at left) and really like them. The Etymotic ear phones come with several different types of ear plug tips, including their standard soft plastic white flanged tips and Comply foam tips on some models. Etymotic claim 35 dB isolation for the white three flange tips and 41db isolation for the Comply foam tips.

Other motor glider pilots using earphones with Comply tips have complained that it can be inconvenient to have to squeeze and mess around inserting the foam tips in your ear especially when needing to do a quick in-air engine start. The Etymoics white plastic tips by comparison just plug in without needing to be squeezed or rolled between your fingers first.

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In late 2005 I installed a large (64W) solar panel on the Cobra trailer for my DG-303 glider and it has worked great. I get asked about the solar panels, so I thought I’d save some information here about it, largely stuff that has been posted in the past to private newsgroups. I’m going to be installing a similar set up on my ASH-26E trailer, but I may play with different charge controllers (more on that in future).

My DG-303 has dual 12 amp hour batteries. I have two sets of two batteries, so I can always have a set charging while the others are in use. I wanted to also be able to leave all four batteries in the trailer hooked up to the solar panel when the glider is not in use. With my glider the batteries need to be removed from the glider for disassembly so it made sense to just make a mount for four batteries in the trailer rather than charge some in the fuselage of the glider parked in the trailer.

I wanted a significant amount of solar power available; something like enough to fully charge a fairly well used pair of batteries on a good sunny day. This meant a large panel with charge controllers, a place to mount four batteries and one or more solar charge controllers depending on the charging scheme. All up costs for this project was around $600 – it could be done for less without some of the over engineering in my set up.

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Thanks to the folks at Alexander-Schleicher it seems I do have an ASH-26E after all. Another glider under completion in the factory. The plain blue stripe will go — and will be replaced by the modern style multicolored swoosh. This glider has no instrument panel so I’m running to get instruments sorted out. It has a fiberglass top trailer already with it which will get swapped for an aluminium top trailer.

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I spent the last two week trying to jump through hoops and buy the order position for an Alexander Schleicher ASH-26E motor glider currently under construction in Germany. It would have meant having a great motor glider here for the peak of this years soaring season. Unfortunately the deal with the current purchaser fell through when he changed his mind and decided to keep the glider. Things were happening so quick and the glider was on such a quick delivery timeframe that I was crunching through options and panel configurations. I even had checked on insurance and started to reserve a N-number. Sigh. So I’m left without a glider but with a panel layout that I like.

I used the Word document from Schleicher that has a graphical panel layout in it. Not sure why they distribute it in Word. I copied the graphic elements over to PowerPoint and also hacked them with Photoshop and some images to mock up what it would look like. Who knows if everything on the panel would have been able to fit perfectly.

Big things for me are the 3 1/8″ United Instruments 5934 series altimeter, a larger airspeed indicator is also nice and if possible using Klixon circuit breakers on the panel instead of the usual fuses. The Altimeter is really important for me, after sitting in a ASH-26E and looking at the 2 1/4″ diameter 20,000′ Winter altimeter it just looks very small and difficult to read compared to the larger 3 1/8″ diameter United altimeter that I fly with now.

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I’ve posted most of this in the past to some newsgroups, but people keep asking about the PDA mounts I have in my DG-303 so here we go.. after experimenting with different options I settled on the mounting arrangement shown in the photos above and I really like how they work.

I use HP iPAQ hx4700 PDAs, these are relatively high end PDAs that are no longer in production but may still be available, at least used ones. The hx4705 was the same PDA sold through different channels. The hx4700 have 4″ diagonal transflective VGA resolution (640×480 pixel) screens. I run SeeYou Mobile so the processor power of the hx4700 is useful but the PDAs are not perfect, more on that below. I have the 3600 mAh extended Li-ion battery packsinstaled that allow the PDAs to operate with a CF card GPS for something like 6-8 hours — providing a backup navigation system if everything else fails in the glider. Failing that I’ve got a compass and sectional charts and I’m not afraid to use them.

Although I’m using hx4700s many of the comments below will apply to all PDAs.

Almost all color PDAs use transflective displays, these do not work well in sunlight. The best thing to do is to get the PDA close to your face and pretty vertical looking straight at you. You don’t want to be looking down at a PDA angled partially up at the sky as it will reflect a lot of light back off the screen. I tried the PDAs with bare screens and with the Boxwave ClearTouch Anti-Glare screen protectors which do improve visibility in daylight a little. Make sure you get the ClearTouch Anti-Glare not ClearTouch Crystal screen protectors.

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