Rain Day at Ionia

Frank Paynter in his Ventus

Sitting in the Micro-Castle on Sunday morning, trying to figure out the weather picture. Yesterday was Rain Day 1 – we had no chance of flying at all, due to a warm frontal boundary sitting right over us, with showers and  clouds riding the front west to east. From a meteorological point of view, this is an interesting system, as the warm front extends east-west all the way from western Nebraska to the eastern seaboard. Apparently the system is being influenced by the tropical storm down in  northern Florida – whew!

This morning’s situation is a bit different, but still very difficult. The east-west warm front has moved slightly to our north, which is a good thing as storms and showers have been sliding along the northern side all night and into this morning. We are progged to be in the ‘warm’ sector today, with highs in the 90’s and lots of sun. You would think that is a good thing, but soaring conditions are forecast to be marginal at best, with windy, blue conditions, when we aren’t covered up with storm blow-off clouds.

On another front (no pun intended), I’m trying to get my ‘brick’ FLARM going, after a configuration boo-boo on my part. Seems the ‘RTFM’ (Read the F—-ing Manual)’ principle can backfire occasionally when the documentation isn’t really up-to-date.  I did RTFM, and consequently managed to configure my brick to disable output to my Butterfly, and the best efforts of Dave Nadler and Gerhard Wesp of FLARM haven’t been able to get me going again. Little did Dave and Gerhard know the trouble they were getting into by setting me loose with a configuration file and a FLARM brick!

Seriously though, if you are using a FLARM brick, you need to be aware that the documentation for the U.S. FLARM ‘brick’ (called the ‘core’ by the FLARM folks) isn’t in very good shape, and in fact is quite contradictory in some areas. In particular the Dataport Definition document seems to be a few revs shy of  a full deck. The best bet is if you have it working, don’t screw with it. In my  case, I *had* to screw with it, as I had to tell the unit that I have a Mode-S transponder on board, and give it my 6-character Hex ICAO identifier so it wouldn’t continually alarm from my own transponder signal.

Also, there is an issue with the polarization of some of the Butterfly units; some are being delivered with ‘horizontal’ polarized displays, and some are being delivered with ‘vertical’ polarized displays. If you wear polarized sunglasses (I do), then you may wind up having to rotate the display (or your head) 90 degrees to see the display. In my case, I had to rotate the display 90 degrees to the ‘portrait’ orientation in order to be able to see. Fortunately the display software allows you to rotate the display output to accommodate different physical orientations.

All for now – I’ll try to post this evening if/when we get a day in.

Frank(TA)