On 8/24/2010 7:53 PM, akiley wrote:
On Aug 24, 12:08 am, Eric wrote:


I've used SeeYou Mobile for 1000+ hours all over the USA, and I'm not
aware of any bugs or gotchas. I would never go back to paper charts,
whiz wheels, or just looking out the window. For example, most of my
final glides begin 30 to 50 miles from the airport, where I can't even
see it, yet they work out well most of the time.

Eric,
What happens if your electronics fry? Hope you have a backup
something.
I've used 4 PDAs over 10 years, 2000 hours total, with no failures, so I
haven't had to pull out the charts and ruler I always carry with me
(mostly out of habit). But, a PDA going bad isn't a SeeYou Mobile problem.
There are plenty of gochas I
can think of is SeeYouM. All you have to do is not double check what
your goto waypoint is, forget to add winds, polar, safety altitude.
Maybe they aren't gochas, but they sort of are for new users.
These aren't SeeYou Mobile gotchas either, they are part of using a
"soaring computer", whether it's a map with circles, paper sheets with
tables of glide distances, or an electronic computer.

The polar and safety altitude (I assume you mean the "arrival altitude",
are settings you should do at home; i.e. "set and forget".

I'm not sure what you mean by "add winds", as SYM automatically uses the
winds in it's computations. Perhaps you mean "adjusting the winds"?
Sometimes you have to do that when you realize the winds ahead of you
are different from the winds SYM has calculated.
It
takes a lot of thinking to make sure you know what you are doing.

Yep, the cockpit is a busy place in a glider if you are going
cross-country, and it takes a while to get accustomed to a flight
computer. I had the advantage of 20 years of soaring before using PDA
flight computers, so the transition was much easier for me.
I have the latest version of SeeYouM that I bought last fall. One
known bug is that the wing loading changes when you leave the polar
screen then come back. Try it.
It doesn't change on my setup (Ipaq 3835 with ver 3.11). Maybe it's a
3.12 issue.
I think they fixed the one with Oudie
that didn't allow the user to set NM in units. You would have to
reset it every time you loaded SeeYouM. I haven't gotten an answer on
my Magnetic Track NavBox yet. It's off by 12 degrees.
I have to admit I've never used any kind of track bearing. I just put
the two different track bearing boxes on my PDA (simulator mode), and
they both read correctly (Washington state area); however, I get the
same error you do when I try to "fly" in Michigan.
Maybe it's
party to do with old PDA hardware but I've had a lot of problems with
logging not starting, and NavBoxes showing no data, and lockups.
Other have had these problem too. Some days my statistic page that is
supposed to show thermal graphs doesn't.

There is a quirk in the older Ipaqs that can cause symptoms like this.
The fix is to disable the IR port, which is sensitive to sunlight, and
slows down the system. Make sure the beam is off on your Ipaq. Do
something like this: Start, Settings, Connections, Beam, uncheck box.

It also might be your hardware, as I've had none of those problems on my
fairly old 3835. What PDA are you using? Do you have GPS problems (you
might be able to determine that by looking at the flight trace in
SeeYou)? What GPS do you use?
I'm slowly replacing components of my iPaq to see if that's the
problem. I just replaced the CF card adapter back, I've tried a
different CF card. We'll see.

I'm definitely a navigator user. I have a Garmin 395, I've put quite
a lot of hours on Garmin G1000's in IFR flight. My point is one has
to be careful throwing full trust into these things.
Agreed. Start out conservatively, get comfortable with it, and then you
can reduce the margins bit by bit to make cross-country flying easier
and more enjoyable.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (netto to net to email me)