Question for you contest fliers...

Dave,

Sometimes, you will not be navigating to the center,
but to a far edge of the circle. Maybe your route
to that far edge will take you through the center and
maybe not.

I use a pda running Glide Navigator II, and you can
move your turnpoint from the circle center to wherever
you need it within the circle. Then, you are navigating
to that point rather to the circle center. If the
303 doesn't support Turn Area Tasks, you might consider
as others have mentioned and get a pda. Another free
software not mentioned is Soaring Pilot http://www.soaringpilot.or
g/ made to run on the Palm operating system, but with
the purchase of 'StyleTap' software, it will run on
the Windows CE platform.

Ray Lovinggood
Carrboro, North Carolina, USA

At 04:18 06 August 2007, 5z wrote:
If you don't plan to use a PDA with moving map, then
the best option
is to use a paper checklist to note your arrival at
each turn. You
will be navigating to the center of the turn area,
so as soon as the
distance to go indicates less than the radius, check
it off on the
list. You must still consider how deep to go and which
side of
center, etc... So continue displaying distance to
this turn, until
you decide to go to the next turn. This will help
as you approach the
back edge of the cylinder as well.

But the key is that if the GPS displays a distance
LESS than the
radius, you are there. Having an audio beep is really
redundant in
turn area tasks especially since we are talking about
fairly large
areas. When flying an assigned task, the audio arrival
notification
makes a bit more sense, as the airspace could be a
bit crowded with
gliders due to the smaller radius.

-Tom