Aerotow with Diesel engine?

Why not two winches; one to launch with and the other to retrieve the cable?
I think I remember this being done years ago. If the drag chute is big
enough, the retrieve winch should be able to return the entire cable. I
wonder how fast two setups (4 winches) could launch a fleet?

"F.L. Whiteley" wrote in message
...

"Kirk Stant" wrote in message
om...
(Mark James Boyd) wrote in message
news:41818652$1@darkstar...
Steve Hill wrote:

I'd really like to see what the actual costs are for a club to
purchase
a
good winch.

The "street" has spoken. There are NO winches in California.
And the ones I researched that were closest were in Arizona or
Washington, and aren't getting anywhere even remotely close to
50 launches a day.

I haven't been to Washington yet, but I have talked to the club there
and they were closed for a good part of last winter (0 launches).

Would a winch in CA do well? I dunno. At Avenal, there are
days when it would be fine, but then again there are
a lot of days or times of the day when a higher tow or further
away is better. And of course I've had 4 aero-retrieves.
Try that with a winch


The Prescott (AZ) Soaring Club does well with their winch, apparently.
Down here where I usually fly at Turf (just west of Phoenix), we
rarely aerotow higher than 1500', I think my usual release altitude is
about 1200' just off the end of the runway into the house thermal -
ideal for a winch! Of course, this makes for a pretty quick cycle
time with a couple of Pawnees, and we would really need a double or
triple drum setup to get a race grid off rapidly, but it sure would be
fun to watch!

Kirk
66
A single drum winch is the poorest of compromises in effeciency with only
cost being the overriding factor. There is simply no reason to drag one
rope at a time and doing so can make the entire process more tedious and
dampen enthusiasm. Only one thing matters to private owners on the
ground,
and that's launch rate. For wide adoption, a two drum winch works well.
For a large operation, two two-drum winches provide high availability and
redundancy, portability is off-site operations are anticipated.

Frank

For experience with retrieve winches see the Long Mynd site, they use one all the time - Bill Dean should be able to tell you more.

Rgds,

Derrick Steed