OLC - Action Needed

Greg Arnold wrote:
I think the point is that the OLC is a money-making venture, and thus
the OLC people are not volunteers doing this for free. Also, regarding
the free newspaper that collects advertising revenue -- if it could be
improved in certain respects, you would not point this out to the
editors due to the fact that it was free to you?


The OLC is not a "money-making" venture. Segelflugszene, the OLC parent
organization, is a German not-for-profit. All of the work is done by
volunteers. Please keep this in mind.

Tim Newport-Peace wrote:

The REAL problem does not lie with OLC or SeeYou or StrePla or Winpilot.
It lies with Cambridge Instruments. This is a problem which affects
files from Legacy Cambridge Recorders and no others.

Despite multiple requests from IGC over many years they have refused to
implement G-records in the .IGC files.

Short of removing the IGC approval, there is not too much IGC can do.

The proper and long-term fix would be for Cambridge to make their
product conform to the Specification and their customer's requirements,
and that is the action that is needed.

But why is it so much worse this year? The Cambridge loggers haven't
changed.


--
Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly

Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA

www.motorglider.org - Download "A Guide to Self-launching Sailplane
Operation"

Eric Greenwell wrote:
Tim Newport-Peace wrote:

The REAL problem does not lie with OLC or SeeYou or StrePla or Winpilot.
It lies with Cambridge Instruments. This is a problem which affects
files from Legacy Cambridge Recorders and no others.

Despite multiple requests from IGC over many years they have refused to
implement G-records in the .IGC files.

Short of removing the IGC approval, there is not too much IGC can do.

The proper and long-term fix would be for Cambridge to make their
product conform to the Specification and their customer's requirements,
and that is the action that is needed.


But why is it so much worse this year? The Cambridge loggers haven't
changed.


SSA?

You cannot edit the IGC file in any way. If you do, the key will be
invalid. You must also keep the original file name because the date
code is important. The only thing you can do is change the last digit
on the file name. You need to do this to make multiple claims from the
same file. It also works to correct some errors where the original file
is already at the server, and you want to change the claim.

If the name and ship are wrong in the IGC file header, you must edit
them in the OLC web form.

5Z wrote:
P. Corbett wrote:

SSA?


Some folks solved the problem instead of flinging mud at the wrong
targets:
http://tinyurl.com/zdyqz

-Tom

Only a question, Tom. I noted that the OLC's problems seem to begin
about the same time period that the SSA became involved. A
coincidence...perhaps.

Paul

P. Corbett wrote:
Eric Greenwell wrote:
Tim Newport-Peace wrote:

The REAL problem does not lie with OLC or SeeYou or StrePla or Winpilot.
It lies with Cambridge Instruments. This is a problem which affects
files from Legacy Cambridge Recorders and no others.

Despite multiple requests from IGC over many years they have refused to
implement G-records in the .IGC files.

Short of removing the IGC approval, there is not too much IGC can do.

The proper and long-term fix would be for Cambridge to make their
product conform to the Specification and their customer's requirements,
and that is the action that is needed.


But why is it so much worse this year? The Cambridge loggers haven't
changed.


SSA?

Are you guessing, or do you know something? Is the USA the only country
having problems with the older Cambridge loggers?

--
Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly

Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA

www.motorglider.org - Download "A Guide to Self-launching Sailplane
Operation"

Eric Greenwell wrote:
P. Corbett wrote:

Eric Greenwell wrote:

Tim Newport-Peace wrote:

The REAL problem does not lie with OLC or SeeYou or StrePla or
Winpilot.
It lies with Cambridge Instruments. This is a problem which affects
files from Legacy Cambridge Recorders and no others.

Despite multiple requests from IGC over many years they have refused to
implement G-records in the .IGC files.

Short of removing the IGC approval, there is not too much IGC can do.

The proper and long-term fix would be for Cambridge to make their
product conform to the Specification and their customer's requirements,
and that is the action that is needed.



But why is it so much worse this year? The Cambridge loggers haven't
changed.


SSA?


Are you guessing, or do you know something? Is the USA the only country
having problems with the older Cambridge loggers?

Eric
In a recent personal discussion with Ian Cant, (the originator of this
thread), if I understood him correctly, said that Cambridge logged
flights out of Germany were not being rejected. My appologies to Ian if
I have misquoted him.

To be very clear, I have been an SSA member since 1973, left once and
came back. Over the years I have seen them do a great job at some things
and not so great at others. It seems that prior to the SSA/OLC
affiliation, American pilots could interface with the OLC with minimal
if any comlaints, even while using a wider variety of logger choices. Is
there cause and effect here? It's too early to say and we may never know
so my earlier comment was not an accusation (SSA!) but rather a question
(SSA?).

Soaring is struggling in the US and any barriers that are thrown up to
limit participation in the sport can only make it worse. I believe that
the OLC could be one of the most innovative ways to stimulate interest
in our sport that I have ever seen.

Paul

The Cambridge security problem was not caused by SSA, but the SSA has
been actively working to resolve the issues.

The problem stems from the fact that the older Cambridge GPS-NAV Model
10/20/25 loggers were designed before the FAI standards were issued.
Cambridge never made these loggers fully standards complient, so they
have always been a special case with their proprietary *.CAI file
format. The OLC has been phasing in security checks over time, and in
November 2005 they stopped letting the Cambridge GPS-NAV files score
without validation (all other loggers required validation by then).
This has nothing to do with the SSA involvement, and affects all
Cambridge GPS-NAV users worldwide.

The SSA-OLC committee has been working very hard on this, since there
are a large number of GPS-NAV users in the US that were affected,
starting with this spring flying season. We have verified that StrePla
users had no problems claiming flights, because StrePla used the same
DOS executable as the OLC to convert the CAI files to IGC format, and
append the CAI data for validation. So StrePla users never had a
problem.

We found that SeeYou users that were able to claim flights prior to
10/2005 could no longer claim flights because SeeYou was using the
Windows DLL, not the DOS executable for the conversion process. The DLL
conversion had different round-off errors that caused the validation to
fail, resulting in the red marks. We were able to encourage Team SeeYou
to quickly implement a patch to use the DOS executable to work around
the problem. This patch is available from their web site at:

http://www.seeyou.si/news/2006/04/gps-nav-patch.html

We also were able to work with Carl Ekdahl who wrote a freeware program
to do the *.CAI file conversion that the commercial programs do
automatically. GPS-NAV users who can barely afford a tow, much less a
commercial flight analysys software package, owe Carl a debt of
gratitude for saving them from the dreaded DOS prompt. ASC has posted
the beta program and detailed instructions at their web site:

http://www.abqsoaring.org/misc_files/CAI_fix.htm

So now there should be no reason that GPS-NAV users cannot post flights
to the OLC as they could before the security checks were enforced.

At 14:18 09 April 2006, P. Corbett wrote:
In a recent personal discussion with Ian Cant, (the
originator of this
thread), if I understood him correctly, said that Cambridge
logged
flights out of Germany were not being rejected. My
appologies to Ian if
I have misquoted him.


To avoid any misunderstanding, let me clarify. I made
a cursory check through the February and March 2006
German daily scores [weekends only] and noticed no
or very few red marks. This suggested to me that the
problem was not common in Germany, but there could
be a number of reasons for that. Later, I checked
one weekend of the International daily scores and found
that the USA was the most heavily affected but France
and Switzerland also had a significant number of red
marks. Other countries may have had some too, this
was only a quick glance through. Such limited samples
should not be relied on to draw broad conclusions,
but they did indicate that there is a serious problem
and it is not isolated to the USA.

The response from both SSA and OLC has been very positive.
Chip Garner and many others have worked to overcome
the technical difficulties and have generated and tried
to publicize effective workarounds and patches. Yesterday's
daily scores from USA show a few red marks [but a huge
number of greyed-out flights], suggesting that the
word is getting out but still has some way to go.
OLC have said that they are considering re-instating
wrongly-rejected flights - please look at

http://www.onlinecontest.org/olcphp/olc-i.php?olc=olc-i


for the full explanation of what has been happening.

I hope this helps.

Ian

Hmmm, I coulda sworn the first time I looked at US
OLC from yesterday(Sat), the evil red mark had been
demonized.

I just took a glance again and there seems to be twice
as many unscored flights as those that scored....????