wrote:

RAS,

I graduate with a degree in Aerospace Engineering in December. Ive
decided to entitle my senior project: "Flight Test Evaluation of a
Cherokee II Sailplane"

It makes perfect sense to me that the culmination of my education
should involve me flying my glider, and perhaps allowing me to improve
my flying (yea right). Mostly, I just want it to involve some
flying. I had a short chat with Dick Johnson at the SSA Convention
about his technique. He mentioned his stopwatch method that has
worked for years, but also said that on his most recent flights he has
taken a flight recorder with him and the results matched pretty well.

Id like to generate the drag polar for my glider. I talked to my
project advisor briefly and he had me check out http://www.eagletreesystems.com/
which makes data recorders for RC aircraft. The cool thing is that I
could get airspeed and altitude readouts for the entire flight, and
then find the polar from that.

President Bush will be mailing me a pretty nice economic stimulus
check at the end of the month. I plan to do my civic duty and spend
it. are there any igc approved loggers that i could use not only for
records/badges/OLC etc. but also that would give me the flight
information that I need to do my senior project?

You all are the experts on the logger stuff. Ive breezed over the
million post threads so it must be so. What do you recommend?

Well, you have a problem. First of all the only loger I know of that
will satisfy your desire to be nice to Bush and provide some relevant
information is Cambridge Instruments CAI302 All others are not US
made. Second of all they are designed to be IGC loggers so they do not
log things you want. You will need to combine logger and some NMEA
logging software. You can roll your own, or use GPS_LOG WinCE which
will provide a log of data you want, but not in IGC format (coma
delimited). Second problem is that you need to get a logger that
provides you with output of IAS. Cambridge CAI302 provides output of
true speed, but no temperature data (?). At best you will have to
altitude compensate TAS to IAS. Borgelt devices, some LX navigation
devices and I believe Westerboer 921 do provide IAS.

Hope that helps.
Henryk Birecki