I am one of the developers of SoarPilot which supports, north up,
track/direction up and course-up and I have pondered this many times.
I believe a given person's preference is simply that...personal. I'm
not a neuro-scientist in anyway, but I think a given person's
preference is mostly driven by how they process spacial and/or
geospacial representations in general and by what they have been
taught to use. Do you prefer to have what you see outside the glider
match what you are seeing on the screen OR do you prefer to mentally
convert and correlate what you are seeing outside with what you would
see on a North up map? From elementary school we are taught to use
and read north-up maps. So we become VERY comfortable with that way
of looking and processing geospacial information. As an example of
what I mean, I have seen a large world wall map in the typical, oval,
equidistant-cylindrical representation. It is normal in every respect
for one....it has the world depicted South UP. And when you look at
it, it immediately seems VERY, VERY wrong? But if you think about it,
it is no more incorrect a representation than a North up map. It only
seems wrong because it's not they way we're used to seeing it.

Later!

-Mark
PS. I like track up best as well.
On Dec 16, 8:22*pm, Ray wrote:
While flying, especially in thermals, I prefer "heads up".
W7

ContestID67 wrote:
It is winter here and the only soaring we are doing in Chicago is in
the hangar . During an energetic discussion on the pros and cons of
various soaring programs, I mentioned I fly "Direction-Up", rather
than "North-Up".

WHOA! You would have thought that I had said I was going to give up
soaring to fly helicopters by the dirty looks that I received.

Now, to be fair, with every GPS device I use (car, boat, GA), I
*ALWAYS* orient the map as north-up, and prefer it overall...except,
that is, when soaring. * I started using north-up at first, but soon
found that a direction-up display was much better in letting me
anticipate the timing of rolling out of a thermal and heading towards
the next turn point. *Attempting to coordinate the rotating glider
icon on a stationary north-up map, with the view outside and/or
compass, all while centering a thermal, is a bit like patting my head
and rubbing my stomach at the same time. *Maybe this is unique to a
thermal-only soaring climate. * *NOTE: I am not directionally
challanged.

Anyway, I wondered what others use relative to the type of soaring
they do.

Thanks, John