On Thursday, August 16, 2012 4:49:01 PM UTC-6, Darryl Ramm wrote:
On Thursday, August 16, 2012 3:03:40 PM UTC-7, BobD wrote:

Trackers are clearly inconsistent. the TipTop one is my favorite with its interactive interface. But which one is accurate?







Early on lots of griping from everywhere that the contest's efforts to provide a "live" internet experience sucked. It of course would be easily solved if some nice sponsor would pony-up several hundred $$$ for the technology. But I'd guess the actual look-in audience return isn't enough to move anyone's budget.







Hopefully some day the best tracker will be able to downlink flight/speed data, gin it into a a readout that would inform us who actually is in what place in the task standings.



I agree that the new TipTop site is just fantastic, but its based on SPOT and so has no altitude data available and SPOT's back-end infrastructure often seems to suffer 30minute+ delays, that may or may not affect some gliders and not others. These delays are seen on SPOT's owne web servers/shared pages as well as ones that use their API. SPOT has some improvements to make here. They just don't seem to be a company with its act fully together at times.



Darryl



Darryl


There's a very cheap terrestrial tracking option by using APRS Ham gear. The advantage is you can set any fix reporting interval you want and include any data you want. You could have a 4 second fix interval with 60 sec vario average, IAS & ALT ect.

Yes, I know users could need a technicians license but it's a really short and easy written test to get - RAS geeks wouldn't have a problem. And maybe you don't even need a technician license if a radio engineer "supervises" their use. Packet radio nets have virtually a 100% coverage of the US and most other countries. If a particular contest site has a coverage gap, installing a temporary repeater or two isn't a big deal.