Hi Darryl,

You ask some very good questions. I don't have firm answers from ClearNav
yet, but the news I have so far is very exciting.

I had a nice, long talk with someone connected to ClearNav last week that
was very enlightening. I don't want to go into specifics yet because the
design is not finalized, but he did say that the unit should be able to
receive data from a PowerFLARM, add vario, airspeed, wind and other data to
the data from the PowerFLARM, and send the combined data to a PDA. That is
great news! But this is very preliminary.

Best Regards,

Paul Remde
Cumulus Soaring, Inc.

"Darryl Ramm" wrote in message
...
On Dec 6, 9:44 am, JS wrote:
Supposed to be available for Spring in the Northern Hemisphere.
Jim

On Dec 5, 8:00 pm, Bastoune wrote:



Found the first picture and info on the NK
Vario:http://www.easternsailplane.com/east...arNav/ClearNav...

Are we nearing a product release? I'd love to ask one for Santa but
would like to have a bit more info before putting it on the list...

Are there any specs available yet? Especially relating to if this is
only of interest to ClearNav users or others as well E.g. The ClearNav
required a C302 to output wind data to the ClearNav display and unlike
most PDA etc software it wanted the actual 302 calculated wind not
just the TAS data. So can this vario output TAS data in a NMEA like
stream? Are soaring software vendors working on supporting that? Can
the vario work like the LX 1606 and pass through NMEA from a GPS or
PowerFLARM etc. and add that TAS and pressure altitude data to the
stream? Or will users with PDAs etc. need a K6 Mux (in addition to
waiting for their soaring software vendor to support whatever NMEA
like data the vario talks?) If the vario only outputs wind data (which
would require it to have a GPS or NMEA input) and not raw TAS then
based on current vendor unwillingness to do anything except their own
TAS based wind calculations it is unlikely third party products will
support that wind data. Somebody make my day and tell me that ClearNav
folks thought about compatibility enough that I can feed a PowerFLARM
NMEA through this box and it will add !w sentences with TAS etc. data
and look like a C302 so current software will just work...(ie. they
followed what LX is doing). ...that would make this a great product.
(I don't care about the vario per se, I trust it is as good or
slightly even slightly better than others, it's the wind/NMEA data
integration that makes or breaks these products for me.).


Darryl


Darryl