darryl ramm's blog

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…)

I was playing with my iPAQ hx4700 running Naviter SeeYou Mobile connected over Bluetooth to the NMEA output from Silent Wings  soaring simulator on a Macintosh (see details here). While messing around with this I discovered that with Windows Mobile 2003 and ROM and firmware version 1.0 that the PDAs shipped with, that there is a bug that will case SeeYou Mobile to hang when waiting to access a Bluetooth serial device where a Bluetooth connection has not yet been made. I suspect this affects all types of Bluetooth connections, but the fix is just to do a simple upgrade to ROM and firmware version 1.10.

I had one iPAQ running Windows Mobile 2003 (with the as supplied version 1.0 ROM and firmware) and another running Windows Mobile 5.0. Selecting COM5 (the Bluetooth serial port)  as the input port for SeeYou Mobile will cause SeeYou Mobile on the Windows Mobile 2003 PDA to hang until I started Silent Wings and it made a Bluetooth connection. On Windows Mobile 5.0 SeeYou Mobile does not hang, it just shows the “NODATA” status message in the top left of the screen. Once Silent Wings connects SeeYou Mobile on the Windows Mobile 2003 would start running OK. The problem was if I did not have the Mac with you to start Silent Wings then  you could not get in and even change the serial port settings before SeeYou Mobile would lock up.

I don’t know if other  Windows Mobile 2003 PDAs have similar problems. To see if a PDA has his problem just turn on Bluetooth on the PDA, don’t do anything else and don’t have the PDA connected to an active Bluetooth Serial connection. Then go into SeeYou Mobile and set it to use the Bluetooth COM port (COM5 for the iPAQ hx4700, this may be different on other PDAs). If SeeYou Mobile hangs it has the problem,  if it reports “NODATA” after a short while and the user interface is still responding to to menu events etc. then the PDA does not have the problem.

Besides SeeYou Mobile and Silent Wings, I suspect this bug affects all sorts of Bluetooth serial connections on the iPAQ 4700. Anyhow upgrading the Windows Mobile 2003 PDA to ROM version 1.1 and firmware update 1.1 appears to fix this problem. Software updates are available on HP’s web site.  The updates I used are available here -

iPAQ hx4700 1.10 ROM update for Windows 2003  (install this first)

iPAQ hx4700 1.10 Firmware update for Windows Mobile 2003  (we will see how long these link works)

I  certainly recommend doing these upgrades and staying with Windows Mobile 2003, and not upgrading to Windows Mobile 5.0., which is a performance dog.

BTW be sure to use a real Windows PC to flash the ROM to the iPAQ, I normally run Window XP under VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro, every time I have tried to run an iPAQ  ROM upgrade from within a VMware Fusion virual machine it will brick the iPAQ, leaving it stuck in the USB ROM loader. I’ve reported this to VMware.

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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Shoe Circus, the first Seinfeld-Gates Microsoft advertisement is just awful.  Crispin Porter + Bogusky the agency responsible for this, should be running for cover. Microsoft is trying to spin it as an attention getter and buzz creator. The only buzz this ad is going to create is of the bad kind, like WTF were they thinking? Are they that out of touch? Is that there best response to Apple and its hip Get a Mac campaign from agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, or to concerns about the perception of Vista? Could this be a deliberate bumbling looking first advertisement in a series that will turn around and be hip and creative? Yea sure, pigs fly.

In contast the Apple Get a Mac campaign uses humor and a minimalistic, hip style the helps focus attention on a simple product related message.  They are little vignettes that tell a simple story about how some feature of the Mac is better than a PC. You know, simple,  clearly explained, benefit focused, and many built on existing stereotypes or impressions (often unfair ones) of competing market dominant products. All good basic advertising stuff. (more…)

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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