Oz Report

Felix from AIR going to California

Joe Greblo|Pat Denevan

Joe Greblo «windsports» writes:

Felix is coming to the west coast in 10 days to run some info clinics and demo the Atos C. It's an opportunity for owners and pilots to meet him and ask him questions.  He will be working with Pat Denevan while in the Bay Area and me in southern Cal.  He arrives in San Francisco on November 15^th and departs Southern California on November 25^th.Those interested can contact Pat at «mission» or me at «windsports».

Pilots can get updates from Pat Denevan at his email address or check our happenings page at http://www.windsports.com/kagelkamframe.html.

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Dune flying north of Byron Bay

Most of the beaches within 100 miles of Byron Bay face east, but there is some curvature to them.  The winds come out of the northeast or southeast.

On Tuesday we went on an expedition looking for soarable dunes.  The winds were quite light so we decided to play with them a bit running from the top of eight foot high dunes and jumping into the control frame.

Conrad relaxes

I get high (sort of)!

Great fun.  The idea, of course, was to see how far you could go flying at about 1 foot off the ground.  It helps that the Moyes Sonic is hard to stall.  Do you think that this could get as popular among kids as skateboard parks?

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Ecuadorian Air Races

Rafael Arcos

http://www.impactoonline.com/ecuavuelo/resultados.htm

Rafael Arcos «rarcos» writes:

Final results of the Ecuadorian Open Hangliding Competition " Canoa 2002 air races" held in San Andrés de Canoa-Manabí-Ecuador, Southamerica days 1-2-3 November, 2002.

Please check our web page www.ecuavuelo.info

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Mike flying in Brazil

Mike Barber

I wrote to Mike Barber and asked him what happened on the two days that he bombed at the Andradas meet.  Here’s what he said:

Both days were windy and I pushed it a bit too hard.

The first bad day I decided to take a different street out of the start gate but the area we were going into began to dry up. It was waving a little bit and the terrain is rolling hills with quite a bit of mechanical action when its windy and I got low trying to dive back in to the gaggle which was basically cross wind.

Betinho told me later that a convergence line often sets up in the area they ran and that helped set up a better line for them.  I ended up making two very low saves, but just yoyoed back to the same place.

On the next to last day (another windy day) Carlos and I had a great start and pushed hard to the first turnpoint out on the flats.  From there we dove back to the mountains from the backside.  Betinho and a couple of others caught us on glide with a different line and we continued to drive to the front of the mountains, but I lost about50 meters on them which became about a 100 meters in the different air.

Carlos continued on with them and pulled it off, which was awesome.  It was very marginal to make the front lip and I just decided it wasn’t worth it going leeside in there still remembering my little incident at Algodanales.  I turned back and ran all the way back to almost the turn point and ended up ridge soaring on a 100meter hill for twenty minutes then landing in a worse place than the mountains.

The last day was text book blue conditions and much easier to read without knowing the area.

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The Future of GPSes

Whalley, Steve «WhalleyS» forwarded this information from http://www.TheHarrowGroup.com:

"All of a sudden, starting 10 or 15 years ago, every electronics device had a clock.  I see position awareness [GPS] going down that same path.  It's just a question of how long it takes." "The chip could be built into cell phones, into PDAs and laptop computers to aid in reading maps, and it could be used in walkie-talkies to provide an extra margin of safety for outdoor activities such as skiing." Tim McCarthy Business Director for GPS, Motorola During an announcement that they will be producing GPS chips less than half the size of a Pentium 4, for about $10. (http://news.com.com/2100-1040-959085.html

That statement was made in September, but just two months later Garmin has ALREADY introduced two, 2-way handheld radios with built-in GPS/mapping capabilities!  (Models Rino 110 and Rino 120 - http://www.garmin.com/products/rino120 and http://www.garmin.com/pressroom/outdoor/010802.html).

One added benefit of this integrated device is its "Peer-to-Peer Positioning" feature which can send your GPS position automatically to whomever you're talking to; their "Rino" will then guide them directly to your position (http://www.garmin.com/products/rino/positionReport.html)! They list for $194 and $268 respectively.

Although I have yet to try these out, I can imagine many applications where these capabilities could easily become a 'must have…' (Image - Garmin Rino 2-Way Radio + GPS combination - http://www.navtechgps.com/images/rino.jpg)

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Hans Heydrich

Heydrich, Frank «frank.heydrich» writes:

I have added a web page on my personal site for my Father with pictures and
thoughts from friends.  The URL is: http://home.att.net/~heydrich.

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