Thinking about gliding
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: UK
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If you look at the PDAs being used they are mostly quite old, as the screens are easier to see in daylight. Suggest you look at what people are using where you fly, as having a local 'expert' can be very useful. See if they will let you 'test drive' in a car.
Note that if your PC doesn't have a serial port you may need to provide one for older PDAs. USB/serial converters seem to have a patchy track record, internal cards (for desktop PCs) and PCI cards (for laptops) seem to generally work properly. And if the PDA will write a declaration suitable for the EW to an SD card that's good as well - you use the PDA to write the declaration, put the card in the EW and turn it on. The other approach is to simply put the correct pilot & glider details in the EW and do paper declarations. Remember, the latest one is the valid one.
Note also you want a PDA that takes 5v in (I have a very old one that takes 3.3v!), as that's what the Microrecorder supplies out for a PDA, so long as it's connected to the glider's power supply. For some bizarre reason the Flarm I have supplies 3.3v out!
Note that if your PC doesn't have a serial port you may need to provide one for older PDAs. USB/serial converters seem to have a patchy track record, internal cards (for desktop PCs) and PCI cards (for laptops) seem to generally work properly. And if the PDA will write a declaration suitable for the EW to an SD card that's good as well - you use the PDA to write the declaration, put the card in the EW and turn it on. The other approach is to simply put the correct pilot & glider details in the EW and do paper declarations. Remember, the latest one is the valid one.
Note also you want a PDA that takes 5v in (I have a very old one that takes 3.3v!), as that's what the Microrecorder supplies out for a PDA, so long as it's connected to the glider's power supply. For some bizarre reason the Flarm I have supplies 3.3v out!
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Shrewsbury UK
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I use an EWD with a Garmin 12XL all connected to an IPAQ HX4700 PDA using a cable provided for this purpose by Severn Valley sailplanes. I run free LK8000 software on the PDA. The IPAQ cost me about £50 on ebay, there are usually plenty on there.
If you use an EW micorecorder you can also get a suitable cable from Severn Valley I believe and then you do not need a seperate GPS.
The cable I use also includes a 12V to 5V converter to run the IPAQ from the glider batteries.
If you use an EW micorecorder you can also get a suitable cable from Severn Valley I believe and then you do not need a seperate GPS.
The cable I use also includes a 12V to 5V converter to run the IPAQ from the glider batteries.
Join Date: Feb 2001
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Baby Bear, I don't think you have provided enough information for the most useful advice you could be given.
Are you going to be flying in a club glider, in which you will take your own equipment with you, or a privately owned glider of your own, in which you can install whatever you want?
Are you looking for equipment with self-contained batteries, or can you feed the units from an existing battery on the glider?
If the things are going to go into club gliders, how are you going to hold them in place so that you can see and use them?
It is not only a question of the equipment itself, there is also the need for connecting wires with the right terminals, and a DC/DC transformer if you need to convert from a 12 V supply which runs the logger to a 3.3 or 5.5 V supply which runs the display unit.
For what it's worth, my display unit is an iPaq 3850, which gives a good sunlight readable colour display. You can buy them second-hand on eBay.
If you are prepared to spend the money on an EW logger, why on earth not spend a small amount extra on a Flarm with logging capability, and have some protection against collisions as well? (Gliding collisions cost 20 lives over a 23 year period. It is one of the big three hazards in recent gliding accident records.)
You can download free gliding software rather than spending a lot of money on commercial packages. Displayed on a PDA such as the iPaq, these things show moving map, give airspace alerts, and display/calculate other things which are useful for gliding.
Hope that helps.
Chris N
Are you going to be flying in a club glider, in which you will take your own equipment with you, or a privately owned glider of your own, in which you can install whatever you want?
Are you looking for equipment with self-contained batteries, or can you feed the units from an existing battery on the glider?
If the things are going to go into club gliders, how are you going to hold them in place so that you can see and use them?
It is not only a question of the equipment itself, there is also the need for connecting wires with the right terminals, and a DC/DC transformer if you need to convert from a 12 V supply which runs the logger to a 3.3 or 5.5 V supply which runs the display unit.
For what it's worth, my display unit is an iPaq 3850, which gives a good sunlight readable colour display. You can buy them second-hand on eBay.
If you are prepared to spend the money on an EW logger, why on earth not spend a small amount extra on a Flarm with logging capability, and have some protection against collisions as well? (Gliding collisions cost 20 lives over a 23 year period. It is one of the big three hazards in recent gliding accident records.)
You can download free gliding software rather than spending a lot of money on commercial packages. Displayed on a PDA such as the iPaq, these things show moving map, give airspace alerts, and display/calculate other things which are useful for gliding.
Hope that helps.
Chris N
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Thanks again all.
chrisN - I am currently flying club gliders, however this is likely to change with me buying a share.
You are right that I have not given much consideration to the mounting or connecting of the device as my objective was to try and identify the best option for serving my gliding and power needs. I do not want to buy Skydemon, for example, only to discover it is not compatible with gliding and have to incur additional costs.
BB
chrisN - I am currently flying club gliders, however this is likely to change with me buying a share.
You are right that I have not given much consideration to the mounting or connecting of the device as my objective was to try and identify the best option for serving my gliding and power needs. I do not want to buy Skydemon, for example, only to discover it is not compatible with gliding and have to incur additional costs.
BB
One of our members was demonstrating a Mio car GPS that he jailbreaked and installed LK8000 on. He also has a generic car GPS set up the same way and was offering them for $100 and $125.
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Indeed.
The trouble with PDAs is that nobody makes them anymore; even if you get an old one off ebay, getting the power/data cables & connections sorted is a major pain.
As RBF points out, the fashionable thing to do these days is buy a car satnav with Win CE as it's operating system & change the settings so that it loads programs from an SD card. Have a look at this Skydemon forum. It seems that you can get software to run on many cheap satnavs simply by changing the name of the yoursoftware.exe file to cheapsatnav.exe & then saving it to an SD card.
Once you've made it work with SkyDemon, you should be able to repeat the process & run gliding nav. software on it as well.
I'm sure that SkyDemon is compatible with gliding, it's just not as useful as dedicated gliding software. The best solution is a single device that runs multiple software (and a separate logger).
The trouble with PDAs is that nobody makes them anymore; even if you get an old one off ebay, getting the power/data cables & connections sorted is a major pain.
As RBF points out, the fashionable thing to do these days is buy a car satnav with Win CE as it's operating system & change the settings so that it loads programs from an SD card. Have a look at this Skydemon forum. It seems that you can get software to run on many cheap satnavs simply by changing the name of the yoursoftware.exe file to cheapsatnav.exe & then saving it to an SD card.
Once you've made it work with SkyDemon, you should be able to repeat the process & run gliding nav. software on it as well.
I'm sure that SkyDemon is compatible with gliding, it's just not as useful as dedicated gliding software. The best solution is a single device that runs multiple software (and a separate logger).
