Hi Chip,
I was in the scoring office at Hobbs when a contestant
was told there was no trace on his little black box.
The guy was devastated, didn't go to the banquet and
I'm told he drove till midnight, not saying a word
to his wife. Answer; You got to have a back-up. I'm
talking, 2 GPS's, 2 displays and 2 recorders. A cheap
GPS driving a computer like the SN-10 would do for
one, but you must have a completely separate system,
like the old reliable Cambridge model 20 for your back-up.

For what it's worth, I have a Borgelt B-100 that I
got used for $750 bucks, driven by a model 20 and another
model 20 for back-up. The B-100 gives me everything
I can possibly want or use in flight, except a good
wind. I get that from my 2 GPS's and by looking 'Outside
the cockpit' at smoke, dust, ripples on the water,
etc. I turn the audio off on the B-100 (back-up only)
and use the climb only audio on my B-40 (hate down
audio) Got two 12 ah batteries that I charge every
nite. Switch from used battery to fresh one by switching
on the new one, just before I switch off the old battery.
Been doing this for 30 years and it works just fine,
please let's not start that 'Voltage spike' argument
again. It doesn't exist, there is however, a voltege
spike that may be produced when your radio is switched
off, so I always turn on my radio first and off last.
I have been using B-100's since they first came out
and have never had a malfunction, except the internal
battery went bad on one, which is probably what went
wrong with the guy that didn't have a trace on the
last day at Hobbs. My model 20's have also treked right
along for 9 years now, but I did loose an internal
battery this spring. Don't want and wouldn't use a
moving map. I believe we have reached a tech-data overload
situation, I am completely satisfied with the above
set-up and it is reliable.
Cheers, JJ


At 23:06 29 September 2004, Chip Bearden wrote:
(from a related thread)
It worked fine but I could hear it on the radio.
Puting the switch in a
metal box and grounding the box should help but it
seems silly to me since
the Volkslogger and SN-10 both can log the flight
and are both very
reliable. Of course the SN-10 log can't be used for
badges or records but
it could probably be used as a backup if the Volkslogger
failed (which is
not likely if reliable 12V power is assured).

Forgive me if I cringe at words such as 'very reliable'
and 'not
likely.' With all due respect to the technical wizards,
these
assurances are maddening for anyone who's lost a flight
due to flight
recorder or other electronic equipment failure.

I've had two unrelated GPS flight recorder failures
in the past 12
months, neither caused by power problems. I know of
several other
logger failures at the Hobbs U.S. Standard Class Nationals
this
summer. Some folks had backups, some lost all points.
Most serious
contest pilots now carry a backup flight recorder which,
at nearly
$1,000 each, is an expensive form of insurance.

My faithful LNAV is still crunching away 12 years after
I bought it
(albeit with a number of firmware upgrades) but takeoff
grids and this
newsgroup are buzzing with complaints about problems
with expensive
varios/flight computers. Most of us have backup varios
but I've seen
few redundant full-race systems.

How frequently do these things fail? With the perspective
of nearly 40
years of soaring, my answer is 'increasingly often.'

What appears to be a significant problem with flight
recorder
reliability is mirrored by the agonized howls I heard
this summer with
many of today's state-of-the-art vario/flight computers.
The common
thread to all of this is the growing complexity of
modern electronic
flight management systems and the small size of the
soaring market
exacerbated by the profusion of small companies playing
in it. I'm a
died-in-the-wool capitalist and I welcome the advances
in
functionality that competition brings. But the unfortunate
side effect
is that no single instrument or device is ever produced
in sufficient
quantity to wring all the bugs out of it.

The ironic result is that many of us own spares for
the cheap but
highly reliable stuff like PDAs (low cost and reliability
being the
result of large non-soaring markets and high production
volumes) but
only one of the really expensive but more temperamental
soaring-specific systems such as flight computers.

Flight recorders are somewhere in between. They work
most--but not
all--the time, and they are sufficiently affordable
to allow carrying
a spare.

I'm being simplistic here, obviously. I'm lumping together
software,
hardware, and power issues, and ignoring differences
across brands.
But I'm still troubled by the growing sense that 'progress'
is pushing
us into greater and greater dependence on electronic
gadgets whose
reliability is proving to be less than acceptable to
serious
cross-country and competition pilots.

At the end of the day, most of us are seeking the least
expensive
combination of reliable, highly functional, easy-to-use
equipment that
provides the most flexibility, compatibility, and redundancy.
That
shouldn't be so difficult, right?

I don't have the answer, if indeed others think this
is a problem. But
I'd welcome other perspectives.

Chip Bearden