On Jan 19, 1:38*pm, "noel.wade" wrote:
Just wanted to also put in a plug for Condor, with one caveat:

Do _not_ use Condor to soar your local area, or your intended contest
area. *At the least you'll find it annoying because of the
inaccuracies. *At worst you'll make bad decisions in real life because
you got used to referencing the terrain in Condor and try to apply it
to the real world!

Condor Soaring is awesome for developing general soaring techniques
and (as TA pointed out) working with a PDA/flight-computer. *It is NOT
designed to give you ground-reference familiarity.

--Noel

Well, I have actually found Condor to be quite helpful for area
familiarization, as Condor uses the same terrain database used for all
other terrain mapping programs, including Google Earth. Flying a
terrain in Condor is much more helpful to me than 'flying' it in
Google Earth or staring at a map.

However, as Noel pointed out, no terrain database is entirely
accurate, and location/elevation errors of hundreds of meters are
common, so assuming that a ridge line goes just so, or that a mountain
pass is just this high, could lead to some very embarrassing moments
in real life. Also, thermals in Condor aren't always where you would
find them in real life, although thermals do tend to favor high ground
as expected. In flat terrain, thermals are distributed more or less
randomly, and don't correspond to infrastructure features like road,
towns, lakes, etc.

TA