On Wednesday, December 20, 2017 at 4:06:25 AM UTC+3, Tom BravoMike wrote:
I guess there are no noteworthy advantages in 'normal' conditions. The 10 or 30 m/s varios were probably meant for extreme conditions which may happen during a rotor/wave or storm front flight. Otherwise you prefer the low range for visibility and accuracy.

On Sunday, December 17, 2017 at 6:25:29 PM UTC-6, Mike C wrote:
On Sunday, December 17, 2017 at 12:21:37 PM UTC-7, Tom BravoMike wrote:
On Thursday, December 14, 2017 at 4:00:23 PM UTC-6, John Foster wrote:
Why do so many gliders seem to have multiple varios? Is it that critical to have a back-up for this instrument? Do they often fail and leave you in "
the lurch"?

Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like nobody in this thread has mentioned the advantage - once you have more than one vario - of different scale ranges. I can remember most of our club gliders had two varios: one up to 5m/s and the other one up to 10 or 30 m/s.

I had set a different range and response time on my Westerboer 1020 than the scale on the Sage but did not find any real advantage and changed the range back.

Yes, I've flown in such wave. I just don't know what I'd do differently if I had a vario that said I was going down at 20 knots rather than knowing simply that the vario was pegged at -10 and the big hand on my altimeter was unwinding at 100 feet every three seconds.

It's actually quite easy to see the difference between 1000 fpm (100 ft in six seconds) and 3000 fpm (100 ft in two seconds) from the altimeter alone. I know.