Thermal Forcasting -Thermal index

On Fri, 26 Nov 2010 12:25:48 -0800, gldrgidr wrote:

I have not been flying sailplanes for the last decade but I have been
flying R/C gliders. It would be great if I could determine what level
of lift I could expect for any flying day.

Look at BlipMap if you're in the USA or RASP in Britain. There are sites
elsewhere too, which provide very detailed hour by hour soaring
predictions for up to 5 days ahead. A description is he

http://drjack.info/BLIP/INFO/ARTICLE...g_article.html

Home websites for BlipMap and RASP:

BlipMap: http://www.drjack.info/BLIP/
RASP: http://rasp.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk/

Most of my flying is done below 600 feet from a small local park.

BlipMaps are useful predictors of when to go fly, but do you know what
the Free Flight fraternity use for thermal detection? I've built and used
inexpensive electronic devices that register where a thermal is in
relation to where you're waiting to launch:

http://www.gregorie.org/freeflight/t..._detector.html

If you fly F3K these techniques would be a good match, but if you're
using gorilla winches and/or flying bigger/heaver/faster models a
downlinked variometer may be more useful:

http://www.eagletreesystems.com/Plane/plane.html


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |