I was just dropping someone a line on Palm programs. There are a couple of
nice programs for Palm OS that allow you to program aviation formulas.
I have recently gone back to using a Palm OS (Sony Clie T27) organizer
rather than a Pocket PC. Being less expensive and smaller, I am more likely
to carry it with me and have it when I need to jot down a note, address,
appointment, etc. The other reason that I like Palm is that there are a lot
of little applications that are quite handy. Anyway, I don't want to get
into a debate between which is better Palm or Pocket PC. There are
certainly some aviation applications, such as Anywhere Map,
http://www.anywheremap.com/ and NavGPS,
http://www.flynavgps.com/ that are
strictly Pocket PC.
There are also some good Palm applications which are very different in scope
from Anywhere Map and Nav GPS, such as CoPilot by Laurie Davis for Palm.
www.palmflying.com is a good source for various programs.
For those of you who just need a function or two or enjoy playing with such
thing,s there are two programs for Palm that make programming basic aviation
functions very easy.
The first is APCalc,
http://www.halcyon.com/ipscone/apcalc/overview.html .
It is a $20 programmable calculator program. For example, to find a cross
wind, it is a simple matter of one program line: WS?*sin(WD?-RD?). In fact
you could just enter this directly and recall it from the history when you
need it. However, it is relatively simple and much more effective to assign
it to a key.
Another is HotPaw Basic,
http://www.hotpaw.com/rhn/hotpaw/. This is a small
basic interpreter that allows you to write simple basic programs on the
Palm. A simple program can be written and programmed in the memo pad such
as:
#crosswind.bas
ws=val(input$("Wind Speed"))
wd=val(input$("Wind Direction"))
rd=val(input$(Runway Direction"))
print "crosswind component", ws*sin(wd-rd)
A good source of these formulas is Ed Williams excellent page:
http://williams.best.vwh.net/avform.htm.
There are also some spreadsheet programs such as MiniCalc,
http://www.solutionsinhand.com/, that can be used.
I have no relationship with any of the producers of the programs I have
mentioned. I just thought some of you might find this useful or
interesting.
John Bell
www.cockpitgps.com