On May 27, 1:44*pm, Tony wrote:
Leah and I are down here at Chilhowee for a VSA rally and had an enjoyable flight in the Ka7 today attempting a silver altitude gain for the highly sought after VSA Silver Coin. *Unfortunately by the time we were hot, tired, hungry, in pain, and had to pee we hadn't quite made the gain. *I found the trace for my FlywithCE interesting though. *We released about 2400 MSL and I soon remembered that I hadn't turned on the FlywithCE. *So I turned it on at about 3000 I think. *Check out the trace:http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0....html?dsId=242...

It seems that the FlywithCE was trying to insist that I had started on the ground, then realized that wasn't right, and attempted to correct for it by jumping the altitude up about 3000 feet. *If it had just recorded the actual altitude it would've been fine. *I would've had a trace starting in mid-air, right where I turned on the recorder.

The IGC decided that position recorders like the FlywithCE will be allowed for Silver and Gold altitude gain after this fall. *Would I be able to claim this obviously bogus trace for Silver Altitude? (evil grin). *I suspect this is a problem associated with not turning the thing on until mid flight but dang shouldn't it just record what the actual position is???

When you first turn on a GPS receiver, it takes somewhere between a
few seconds and minutes for it to figure out where it is and find
sufficient satellites to track for a full 3D fix. During that period,
a flight or position recorder should set the navigation warning flag
in the recorded fixes, indicating the full 3D navigation is not
available. I can't download the IGC file (as I'm not registered on
the OLC site), but I suspect you'll find that the first few B records
have the character "V" in column 24, indicating no GPS data or 2D
fix. In any case, if you submitted such an IGC file to the "Badge
Guy" after October 1, it would be rejected due to lack of an
acceptable altitude baseline prior to takeoff...

Marc