Anyone watch Perry real-time SPOT tracks?

I'm curious if anyone out there besides Mark and myself watched the
real-time SPOT tracks from Perry? Mark and I (mostly Mark) are
planning to do the same thing at the 15m Nats, so I'm looking for
suggestions/comments from users.

Regards,

Frank

On Apr 28, 10:57*am, Frank wrote:
I'm curious if anyone out there besides Mark and myself watched the
real-time SPOT tracks from Perry? *Mark and I (mostly Mark) are
planning to do the same thing at the 15m Nats, so I'm looking for
suggestions/comments from users.

Regards,

Frank

Yes, I generally brought it up each day. I was amazed that you were
flying at all some days
with the wind howling away. However, it's hard to get an idea what's
going on -- the task list
on each day seemed to be sorted by the turnpoint ID, rather than the
actual task order. You
could puzzle out the task from looking at the map, though.

My buddy that has a SPOT locator had to drop out of club class, so
he's going to loan it
to the rest of the Harnett contingent, so you guys will be able to
track at least one of us
on the other task of the day.

-- Matt

Hi Matt,
You raised a good point. So I just fixed it so that the order for
each task is now listed in the proper order. It seems to be correct
in both Google Earth and the Google Maps display. Perry is online for
that (with the last day's task) and Cordele will have that a well. I
setting that up now.

So I see both you and Ray in the entrants list. I'm putting together
the tracking site now so if you send me the URL for the shared page
for that SPOT I'll go ahead and get you entered into the system.

Later!

-Mark
On Apr 28, 9:03*am, wrote:
On Apr 28, 10:57*am, Frank wrote:

I'm curious if anyone out there besides Mark and myself watched the
real-time SPOT tracks from Perry? *Mark and I (mostly Mark) are
planning to do the same thing at the 15m Nats, so I'm looking for
suggestions/comments from users.

Regards,

Frank

Yes, I generally brought it up each day. *I was amazed that you were
flying at all some days
with the wind howling away. *However, it's hard to get an idea what's
going on -- the task list
on each day seemed to be sorted by the turnpoint ID, rather than the
actual task order. *You
could puzzle out the task from looking at the map, though.

My buddy that has a SPOT locator had to drop out of club class, so
he's going to loan it
to the rest of the Harnett contingent, so you guys will be able to
track at least one of us
on the other task of the day.

-- Matt

Yes, looks like there have been some tough days, finding gliders in a
few fields around the task.
Jim

At 16:38 28 April 2009, JS wrote:
Yes, looks like there have been some tough days, finding gliders in a
few fields around the task.
Jim


I checked in on the site daily and it along with Tom Kelly's reports were
almost enough to made me feel like I was there, but the experience was not
as good as my crew explained it to me when I was flying at the Seniors and
he was on the ground with the other crews watching the action at the
field!

I did have some difficult figuring out the tasks for the different classes
which will not be a problem at the 15M Nationals.

On Apr 28, 12:38*pm, JS wrote:
Yes, looks like there have been some tough days, finding gliders in a
few fields around the task.
Jim

Jim,

Well, maybe not ;-). Several pilots didn't (or couldn't) get their
SPOTs into TRACK mode, so the only location information came from the
few times they hit the OK button. If they didn't make a final OK
transmission after they landed, then their tag would get stranded out
on course somewhere. I am at least partially to blame for this
situation as I found out later I wasn't absolutely clear in how to
make sure the SPOT is actually in TRACK mode. SPOT added the TRACK
mode after the hardware was designed, and it's not easy to tell when
this mode is actually in effect.

Frank