constant weather update during competition

Hi All

I was just wondering if a constant weather update during competition was something usefull. With computertechnology getting smaller, cheaper and faster, and radiocommunication getting better, would it be useful to have some high resolution weather images of the area of the competition and it's surroundings?

I was thinking of some kind of basestation, which recieves weather pics from a satelite, cut out the competiton area with cumulusclouds placing, cloudstreets and so on, Processes it to a easy-to-look kinda view..., compress it, and send it via radiocom. to the gliderpilot. The pilot could then have the advantage to see how the weather would be f.x. the next 300 km on the task LIVE (or with small delay 10-15 minutes???), and see which route that could be the most optimal.

This could be a system powered by the ordinary 12V supply. Price???

Good idea???

I've often wondered how much help this could be. One concern is the distraction it might have from piloting. Perhaps this could be tried in two-seaters first, to see if it actually had value. A two-seater might be able to carry all the equipment it needed to try it without any ground station.

Jerry P. of WinPilot once asked about wireless connections to the PCs used in a glider, but I don't recall anyone taking him up on it.

Whether such a thing is used in competition will be up to the rules committee and the competitors. I think they will eventually come around to it.

However, I think it would be marvelous for sport flying. Just exploring a wide area around a gliderport with great confidence in a two seater would be a great learning experience. It would also provide a lot of accurate feedback to people like Dr. Jack.

Bill Daniels

Ian

You must spend lots of time in the weeds! My mobile stops behaving above 2,000' - then again in East Anglia above 200' you can normally see several masts - how do you do it?

Fantastic idea. It would of course be very useful for racing, in particular pilot-selected tasks. It would also be a key safety improvement, especially when flying around thunderstorms, squall lines, etc. as we all too often seem to end up doing. Add wind at various levels, and forecast updates, for example blipmap forecasts of shear lines etc.

Alas, as of now, this would be clearly banned by US contest rules. (See 6.11). But if you get the system going, pilots start flying with it, pilots decide they love it, they will demand it in contests, and the rules will change, just as they did with GPS.

John Cochrane BB

Out here in mostly cloudless Arizona, what we need is a method of getting more reliable soundings. Our challenge is deciding beforehand what the day's going to be like for setting up club contests or informal cross-country flights. Once we're in the air, I doubt that in-flight information is going to do a lot better than our eyes.

You can see the sort of stuff I use for my weekend soaring horoscopes on my Arizona Soaring Forecast web site at http://home.earthlink.net/~powercetcorporation/SFINDEX.htm . We've found that Dr. Jack's Blipmaps are most useful and accurate, but local soundings often misleading. I'm always looking for suggestions.......?

Technically, we could certainly find a way to link to the cockpit, but I'm not sure it would be that useful out west.

Mike the Strike

ASW 20 WA

I just want to point out, that GSM is not intended to be used from aircrafts. GSM uses directional ground antennas tuned to the according to terrain and buildings as to cover cells that overlap in only a very small region. Therefore you are lucky if your cell phone is able to connect to a GSM-cell above a certain hight. Because of the missing ground barriers cells extend over a larger area above ground level and therefore the overlap is bigger. This could be a problem if there are several cells and your phone doesn't know which one to chose. Or the call handover could not function when you transit from one cell to another if those cells do not normally overlap on the ground.

In Germany the use of any uncertified radio in aircrafts is prohibited by law.

I checked with technical staff at Vodaphone before trying anything. Whilst you are not allowed to make voice calls whilst in commercial aircraft there is actually nothing stopping you from having the handset on and connected to data services when you are in a private aircraft.

Ian

Mostly correct, but the problem is not in the overlapping hemself.

Usually the GSM cell's locations are calculated for ground, using very specialized software. The basic idea is that the operator has some very narrow band available to get the cells separated. In the air, it may happen that the normally separated cells with the same base frequency will overlap and that's the problem. In that case, phone doesn't know with what cell he talks to. However, this case is rare in normal soarign areas.

I have been able to send SMS messages from up to 2000 meters. And in level flight, talking with the GSM phone poses little problems below 2000 meteres unless one travels faster than 250 km/h. At least that's the case in Estonia, where 99.9 percent of the country has GSM coverage.

Regards, Kaido