On Fri, 05 Jun 2020 11:00:11 -0700, sebesta wrote:

On Friday, June 5, 2020 at 1:26:21 PM UTC-4, wrote:
Good and cheap are mutually exclusive. A good, safe machine won't be
cheap.

Right, but I thought the idea of the original question was to see if
sacrificing some good (higher than 300 foot tow?) might make cheap and
safe possible.

Seems like a small corner case until there are lots more FES, but still
fun to think about.

Agreed! It's a fun thought experiment for a growing sector of the sport.

For me, the issue is that if I have a setup which can get me to 300', it
can get me a lot higher for minimal extra effort. 300' would mean about
600' of linear space, which is unlikely to fit in the area before a
runway. So once I'm using any part of the runway, I might was well use
the entire length.

The rule of thumb over here is that you get to 1/3 of the cable length,
not 1/2, but it depends on wind too. Our Skylaunch (around 400 hp from V8
on LPG and 1000m (3270 ft) of cable gets me to 1200ft on a light breeze
and 1400 ft plus in more normal summer weather with a reasonable wind
gradient (Std Libelle, not pulling hard, so around 1/2.5 of line length
on average.

A low power winch won't do nearly as well.



--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org