On Thursday, August 1, 2013 3:20:49 PM UTC-7, Naviter Info wrote:

I dare to say that accurate thermal assistants are a myth and that head down time during circling is a waste unless you are consciously learning a particular technique. At the same time - I do keep the "ding ding" thermal assistant active most of the time. Mainly because at times I become useless when I am talking on the radio, looking at my landing options or become plain old tired. That's when the thermal assistant's "ding ding" is usually right and very useful.



Regards,

Andrej Kolar


Thanks for the reworked thermal assistant Andrej. I do like the zoom/tracking feature as it allows me to explore a spread out area of lift and still return to the hotspot(s) with some reliability. It also allows me to account for wind drift a bit better.

I do think the arrow and beep in the climb optimization is still a bit irregular as it is sometimes seems 180-degrees out of sync from where the stronger lift turns out to be. I'm not sure how you are integrating the climb rates around 360 degrees, but it feels as though the arrow points to the strongest single 20- or 30-degree sector of lift rather than the direction to move the circle to maximize the rate of climb around the entire circle. I realize that with a choppy thermal it is easy to confuse any estimation algorithm, but there is something my brain does (and WinPilot seems to do) that still nets this out a bit better. I wonder if there are more parameters you could expose to allow some tuning to individual preferences. Lastly, an average climb line graph over the past 5-7 circles would also be welcome - I make due today with the 20 second averager versus the climb for the thermal, but a trend line would be more intuitive.

Again, nice improvements - I agree it is very useful in those cases where I have gone brain dead for a moment, but I also use it to speed coring thermals any time when I am unable to core on the first turn and a half - which is most of the time.

9B