On Sep 8, 11:17*am, Brad wrote:
Anyone use one of these? I bought one and am pretty satisfied with it,
but it has this "feature" that requires it to send the flight to a
website to get a "sign"/validate the G-record.............half the
time I can't get my flights signed and this means they are not OLC
valid.

Thanks,
Brad

I have had a FlyWithCE recorder for several years now, and I haven't
had that problem, but a couple of others.

1) Every time it downloaded it went back to ALL the previous ones for
the year first. It took a long time every time I downloaded, and
made for a LOT of duplication on the log. But pushing the button on
the end, under the flap, corrected that (got that hint from the folks
at FlyWithCE in an email).

2) The recorder seems to work great, but eats batteries at a terrible
rate. Last summer, when I had just gotten it, I lost over 3 hours of
my best flight because I had tried to use the same batteries for a
second flight. Now, I change batteries EVERY flight. Three cheers
for more affordable Costco AAA batteries.

3) it only records GPS altitude, and at least here in SW Colorado, GPS
starts reading much higher than presure altitude as you get higher.
When my pressure altimeter in the panel reads 17,000', my Garmin Pilot
3 GPS (and I assume my FlyWithCE does too), shows 17,800'. Needless
to say, on booming days with very high cloudbases, when we get to
17,800', or so, staying just below class A, and legal, my FlyWithCE
GPS traces indicate I have flown way too high. I just had quite a
discussion yesterday with another pilot who called me to complain
after seeing a recent OLC post. I subsequently sent him an email with
some jpgs of my panel I had taken a few years ago showing the
disparity. In my future OLC posts I need to add a comment about that
so as to not wrankle others who see the OLC charts of my high (yet
legal and still below FL18) flights. There was an article in Soaring
a few months ago discussing the pressure / GPS disparity, but I don't
think it indicated anything close to what I see here when we get
high. Below 14,000' my GPS and my OLC traces seem pretty close to
what my altimeter had indicated.

With those comments in mind, keep on enjoying your very affordable
flight recorder.

Bob T.

ps... I don't fly in competitons, just as a sniffer in them, and other
days just for fun, so my FlyWithCE results are never used for
contests, although I would think they might. But, that allows me to
fly and also enjoy the social atmosphere of contests. I only got it
to get the local FSDO (Scottsdale, AZ) off my butt. They claim if you
fly an experimentally registered glider, in order to fly more than 50
miles from the "home base" it has to be contest flying or practice for
contest flying. OLC is recognized by SSA as a valid contest.