On Thursday, July 16, 2015 at 8:23:25 AM UTC-4, Sean Fidler wrote:
Solution: (drumroll......) Get a smartphone (used on eBay). Tadaaaah!
This conversation is akin to saying I want to go bicycle riding...but don't want to buy a bike???? XCSoar software is (of course)free. A used android smartphone is $50-$250 bucks.
http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item...alID=EB AY-US
"You can lead a horse to the water but can't make it drink..."
A fully functional, outstanding soaring flight computer for $125. Nice phone too if you can bear to bring yourself into the 21st century.
Complaining about flight computers, books and manuals with this kind of high performance and extremely low cost solution available is unnecessary. All you really get with a $6000 spend on the "fancy stuff" is a brighter in panel display, airspeed and temp integration (wind, higher accuracy) and stick controllers. You can always mount the smart phone on the panel with industrial Velcro or a accessory mount...
Hi Sean,
Not trying to start anything.
In this thread & others (sorta related to the same vein..... "Get a Smartphone" with comments from you & others...), I guess I didn't understand the comment was, "Buy a used Smartphone for cheap, then use it as a display..... not to use it as a phone and pay for a dataplan".
Maybe it's "Exceedingly obvious" to you & others that made the same comment, but it wasn't obvious to me.... possibly others.
Not disagreeing, just commenting that maybe a few more words like, "Buy an outdated Smartphone and use it as a display with free soaring software for your glide computing needs" would limit/eliminate questions/issues.
I am NOT in a position to buy 4 Smartphones, get dataplans and THEN use my phone as a glide computer interface, but that is sorta what I gathered from comments in a number of threads.
Do you see my view?
Regardless, someone I know (that uses these threads) mentioned what you & others were likely driving at, I had not considered that as an alternate. Sorta makes sense.
Carry on.
Have a nice day.