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#1
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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 Not disagreeing, just commenting that maybe a few more words like, "Buy an outdated Smartphone and use it as a display with free soaring software for your glide computing needs" would limit/eliminate questions/issues.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. |
#2
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I do. Your absolutely right. Point taken. Not enough description. I have an old Android phone with no data or service as a backup now. For my first 3 years of soaring (01-04) this with XC Soar was my primary and was excellent for contests and cross country about $150 dollars. For the money it's almost unbeatable.
Top hat is great too. The Kindle has outstanding sunlight readability. Oudie is also good, and integrates easily with varios, SN10s etc for wind and NMEA sentences but with cables your looking at $750+. I still have trouble reading my sunlight Oudie in the sun so I kinda feel like I wasted money "upgrading" from the XC-Soar. Sean |
#3
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What about small tablets, anyone using those as a flight computer?
Say the GalaxyTab4. http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_gala...4_7_0-6251.php It has GPS. I went into Office Depot and downloaded TopHat / XCSoar on it using the stores wifi and then cut the wifi off and the GPS picked up my position inside the store. The screen seemed to look nice and all functions seem to work. Don't know about direct sunlight though, but could a sunscreen be used for this or any other device. After all the panel is somewhat of a sunscreen to panel instruments. |
#4
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I did the same with a Galaxy III. It looked great in the store so I
bought it and was very disappointed with it in the cockpit. See if you can take it outside into the direct sunlight before buying it. I've found the Dell Streak 5 to have the best sunlight readable display. They can still be found on eBay pretty inexpensively. I have three of them... On 2/25/2016 3:00 AM, Casey wrote: What about small tablets, anyone using those as a flight computer? Say the GalaxyTab4. http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_gala...4_7_0-6251.php It has GPS. I went into Office Depot and downloaded TopHat / XCSoar on it using the stores wifi and then cut the wifi off and the GPS picked up my position inside the store. The screen seemed to look nice and all functions seem to work. Don't know about direct sunlight though, but could a sunscreen be used for this or any other device. After all the panel is somewhat of a sunscreen to panel instruments. -- Dan, 5J |
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