On Sep 27, 10:06 am, Chip Bearden wrote:
On Sep 27, 9:11 am, toad wrote:

I also wanted to land back where I took off :-)

That's hard to do without the camera or logger.

Todd

Hard but not impossible. Back in the "olden days," you were allowed to
use observers. On more than one occasion my father radioed the FBO at
a local turnpoint and got him to come out and "observe" him (5,000
feet above!) as he crossed the airport. Then my dad would send the guy
a letter with a pre-filled form to sign and a stamped, self-addressed
envelope, and receive it a week later. OK, it was kludgy but it was
possible.

I agree that cameras and photo declarations and getting the film
processed without cutting the negative were a hassle. On the other
hand, so is trying to upload waypoints when ActiveSync won't release a
COM port or any number of other modern glitches. Just Google this
newsgroup for the plaintive cries for help. Worse yet, go to any user
group page on one of the hardware or software makers' Web sites and
read about the real-world experiences of pilots who are unknowingly
(and unwillingly) recruited as beta testers by engineers who know they
can't possibly afford to test their products for the soaring world the
way they would for a larger market. Cameras are sold by the tens of
thousands if not millions. By comparison, sales of loggers, flight
computers, and related software and systems are infinitesimal. And
anytime you think that the gliding community has somehow magically
developed the skills necessary to acquire, configure, use, and
troubleshoot various electronic gadgets that have to talk to each
other, just show up in the scorer's office at any contest to see the
parade of pilots waiting to have the scorer upload the contest
database for them.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
USA

Or the contest pilot that shows up with a logger, but no cables to
upload or download that logger. Because I had the same logger (a
Colibri), I got drafted to help him.

So I understand that computers have there own problems. But for me,
the electronic skills were so much easier to deal with, and most
importantly, require very little from my potential observers and me on
the day of the flight, that I could declare a badge task at about 1
minutes notice before takeoff. All of the computer mucking about was
done on a tuesday night in my house, there was no work to be done at
the airport before takeoff.

Todd