I was recently asked to contribute some flight log analyses for an upcoming presentation by John Mittell for his club on his first-time competitor experience at the Seniors. I downloaded flight logs from the SSA site and started going through them in See You, and I noticed that thermals looked very funny. Instead of pentagons or hexagons or circles, I was seeing jagged back-and-forth lines. I looked at the fix times in SeeYou and discovered that fixes were 12 sec apart instead of 4 sec (or 1 sec for some ClearNav files), making thermals basically impossible to analyze, and causing See You to badly miscalculate average climb rates. When I looked directly at the IGC files with a text reader, I saw the following note embedded in the file:

LXXX
LXXX Note: This IGC file has been condensed by Winscore for Internet spectators.
LXXX Contact the contest organizers for the complete version of this file.
LXXX (The complete version was used for contest scoring calculations..)
LXXX

In this day and age of ubiquitous high-speed internet, this makes little sense, and compression to this degree makes them completely useless for their intended purpose - i.e. making them available to other interested parties for education and training purposes.

I'm not sure who to approach about this, but how do we get this policy of deliberate filicide (my new word for the day) reversed?

Frank (TA)