Revisiting the Cambridge Model 20 OLC failures...

Westbender wrote:
Has anyone figured out a way to submit valid igc files from these
devices? For the last few seasons, everything was working fine. This
year, about 3 out of every 4 OLC postings produce an invalid status.
The OLC folks have been nice enough to fix the log file status, but
they cannot continue to do this. What's the secret? We've tried See
You as well as the DOS command line utilities. Same results no matter
which method we use.


What exact error do you get? is it only OLC complaining or does VALI-CAM
fail as well?

Have you run VALI-CAM on every file before submission?

Darryl

After each flight I perform the download from the Cambridge to an Ipaq
using Connectme from Naviter. When I get home I sync the IGC file created
by Connectme to the PC and do a direct file claim to the OLC site.

It has worked every time this year, I get a green V (validated OK).

The IGC file created by Connectme has the binary .CAI file contents
appended at the end. This allows OLC validation.

I believe you cannot submit flights to the OLC directly from SeeYou
anymore.

The problem is that we get the red "V" on the OLC site after
submitting. All the output from vali-cam shows everything to be
correct. All validation passes....except for the OLC.

I corresponded with the folks at the OLC and they recommend I use the
command line utilities (vali-cam, cai2igc, etc.). However that method
does not work 100% of the time either. They claim it's an issue with
the legacy cambridge loggers and they recommended yesterday that we
should upgrade our logger.

I personally have a 302, which works flawlessly. A fellow club member
has the model 20 that we can't seem to get valid OLC submittals out
of. I've been doing the conversions and submittals for him. The
interesting thing is for the last 4 seasons or so, the files were
accepted by the OLC 100% of the time. This problem just started this
year.

Ok, I could use a little schooling on these converted cai files.
Here's the message from Juergen @ OLC regarding the problems with the
files. He sent this about 3 or 4 files ago.

"The signature in the .igc file was missing. The validation procedure
only can validate the binary .cai file. Therefore the .igc file for
the OLC consists of three parts: The plain igc records, the signature
and the embedded .cai file. The server splits this combined file and
checks the .cai file and the signature. Without that signature the
file is invalid. I extracted the .cai file from the .igc file,
converted it again with my own procedure (you can find it attached)
and replaced the file in the flight claim with this new one."


Vali-cam shows the cai file to be fine, so I'm assuming that's not the
problem. When I look at the igc file, I can see two "G" records. Are
these the "signature" records that Juergen is referring to? What other
kind of signature file is there besides what's in the original cai
file?

Update...

After looking at the different files from different conversion
methods, the See You converted files are in fact missing the "G"
records. However, the DOS cmd line utilities are creating "G" records,
but the files are still invalid when submitting to the OLC. Once in a
while one will work, so this is an intermittent problem, but most of
the time we get a failure.

I have sent another email to the OLC help group with more details to
see if they can tell me precisely what is wrong with the latest files
that do have the "G" records.