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Old July 15th 18, 12:39 AM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
WB
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Default Top Hat Question (XCSoar?)

On Saturday, July 14, 2018 at 4:20:32 PM UTC-5, Tango Eight wrote:
On Thursday, July 12, 2018 at 1:17:04 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Thursday, July 12, 2018 at 7:51:16 AM UTC-4, Tango Eight wrote:
Is anyone else enjoying the irony as much as I am :-)?

Jus' curious.

Goin' flying today (yippee!). I don't plan to spend much time looking at a computer.

T8


No irony Evan. Every software effort has ongoing bugs and enhancements.. The fact that Tophat is as useful as it is, while being free, is wonderful. Big thanks to the developers, especially Robert Dunning! And yes we want to look outside the cockpit mostly, but without some sort of glide computer we'd either be lost, spend more time deciphering paper maps, or stay closer to airports to make sure we can glide there.


Do a search for Chip's r.a.s. contributions as far as GPS vs pilotage and maybe you'll get the irony :-).

TopHat is idea rich and a lot of Rob's ideas are very good and I'd put 'em in ClearNav if I could! If TH works for you, that's fine. Understand that there's quite a lot that CN just does better and it is vastly more robust. One example: What happens if you lose power momentarily with TopHat? Here's what happens with ClearNav: nothing! Task and stats are retained along with the validity of the flight log.

T8


Well, actually, if my Kobo mini running TopHat gets disconnected from ships power, it just keeps on running on the Kobo's internal batteries. Now, if the GPS feeding data to my Kobo loses power, then I have a problem with the flight log, but I don't use the Kobo as my primary logger anyway. Got a PFlarm and a Nano 3 for that. By the way, what happens if a ClearNav dies in the middle of a contest? Do most ClearNav users keep a spare ClearNav around? I got a backup Kobo mini in the side pocket in my cockpit (have not had to use it so far).

This is not to say that I wouldn't rather have a ClearNav. In fact, even though I don't own a ClearNav (at present),I very much appreciate the investment, effort, and dedication to the sport that it takes to develop, manufacture and market the ClearNav or any other instrumentation for the soaring market.