I’m back in my Micro-Castle after a nice dinner at the Lamplight Grill in downtown Ionia.  I begged off the movie night (premiere of MIB43-1/2), explaining that if I were to have the temerity to go to a movie without my wife, my currently long soaring leash might be shortened considerably (or wrapped tightly around my neck!).  The dinner and company were great, and I can afford to wait on the movie ;-).

The day here was very interesting from a weatherman’s perspective, although we were ultimately unsuccessful in getting a day in.  We have this confounded east-west warm front ‘over us’ (for a fairly loose definition of ‘over) and it is  extremely hard to figure out what’s going to happen in our little corner of the  universe.  The weather was progged to be blue (at least in terms of thermally-generated cumulus clouds), with a chance of a cloud deck advecting in around 6000’ msl, with winds out of the south-southeast starting at around 10kt and increasing throughout the afternoon.  There was a small, though not completely unrealistic chance of getting a task in, so we all assembled and gridded up.  Based on the wind forecast, we gridded on runway 18, which was kinda strange, because up to about an hour before grid time, the winds were out of the east or northeast.  Fortunately for my continued health and well-being as the contest weatherman, the winds did finally switch around to a more southerly direction by grid time.  Then the next problem was that there were clouds where there weren’t supposed to be any, and they actually looked pretty good – almost like nice fat cloud streets.  Fortunately for my weather forecast, but unfortunately for the soaring prospects, they too disappeared to be replaced by a quite blue day, one where the temperature refused to climb high enough to sustain flight.  Part of this was due to some thin cloud layers that seemed to form out of nowhere and drift through, cutting down the insolation just enough to screw things up.

CD Bob Fidler hung in there in the finest Charlie Spratt tradition until sniffer John Sullivan (UFO) had relighted once and then landed, and the time got too late to have any realistic chance of getting in a task, and then pulled the plug.  A few pilots stayed out on the grid and took tows, but they soon returned to the field after finding nothing sustainable.  Later in the day the winds picked up to over 20kt and switched around to the north again – go figure.

Popular weather for tomorrow is for 30% chance of T-storms, winds from the southwest increasing in speed throughout the day, probably due to an active cold front approaching from the west.  Chances for a soaring day are probably less than 50%, but I’m sure we’ll give it a go.  The front should come through tomorrow night, and so I’m hoping Tuesday and beyond will be good soaring weather – we’ll see.

With the day being called, I was finally able to un-scew my FLARM ‘brick’ and get my Butterfly display working again.  Just prior to coming up to Ionia, I had attempted to configure my brick via the USB port only to discover that I had misinterpreted the syntax of a particular configuration command (in my defense the documentation is horribly out of date) and managed to disable the display.  Subsequent attempts with the help of Dave Nadler and Gerhard Wesp to un-screw the screwup were fruitless, for no apparent reason.  Finally in desperation, Dave Nadler suggested I try a different USB stick, and lo and behold – that worked!  Now the Butterfly display was actually displaying again, so I could complete the configuration step, adding commands to the config file to tell the brick that my glider has a Mode-S transponder and tell it my unique transponder Mode-S ICAO code.   Hopefully tomorrow or the next day I’ll get a chance to actually see how the brick works in flight.

I must say that configuring the ‘brick’ is an entirely different kettle of fish than configuring the portable unit.  On the portable, all the configuration items are accessible via the display menus, and you can readily confirm that your configuration changes have taken effect.  With the brick, it’s kind of a ‘plug and pray’ operation.  You have to create a text file called FLARMCFG.TXT and place the appropriate configuration  commands in this file.  There are examples available on the FLARM/US website, and there is a ‘Dataport Definition’ document available as well.  Unfortunately, both of these are out of date and replete with typos and ambiguities.  And, as I found to my horror, it is quite easy to render one’s display inoperative, and quite hard to get it back again (ok, it would have been a LOT easier if the USB stick hadn’t decided to act up in the middle of the dance, and that’s not really FLARM’s fault).  Moreover, there is no easy/obvious way to tell whether or not your configuration changes have actually taken effect.  There is a single LED on the back of the brick, which (assuming you can see it from where it is buried underneath your panel) can tell you whether or not the brick is actually processing commands from the FLARMCFG.TXT config file (it blinks green each time it successfully processes a command), but it only tells you that the brick processed A command, not which one, and AFAICT, there is no way to verify proper operation after it has been configured, other than to watch its behavior on the next flight.

Another annoyance/frustration is the way the Butterfly display behaves in the absence of other FLARM signals and with zero airspeed.  Under these conditions, it simply displays its butterfly banner and two ‘bar graph’ icons – one labelled ‘GPS’, the other labelled ‘TX’.  These start out red, and change to green when the brick gets a GPS lock and starts transmitting FLARM data, respectively.  The display simply refuses to switch to the ‘radar’ depiction unless  and until there is another FLARM target (or maybe a Mode-S transponder?) within range, or the airspeed is somewhat above zero.  This is annoying at best, and IMHO somewhat MicroSoft-like in its arrogance (we know what is best for you, so shut up and color).

Anyway, the thing is  working now (I hope – I can’t actually tell yet), and  hopefully all will be well and I’ll never have to go through the USB-configuration-kabuki-dance again.

Frank (TA)