Jim Rooney <<jim>>
writes:

You have saved my bacon.

A while ago, I'd asked your advice on potential cell phone based GPS loggers.
You sent me a list with explanations about each one's strengths.

I'd put it away for an other day, until last night. I had a FlyMaster GPS on
deck for work, doing paragliding tandems here in Queenstown, New Zealand. I'd
prefer Flytech, but that's a longer story.

Over here, we fly at a ski field. We have some very strict restrictions mostly
involving staying 40+ meters away from the ski field and the chair lifts in
particular. As you might imagine, they have no sense of humor about this. The
last violation resulted in a two year ban for the pilot. Since he's a tandem
pilot, that meant that he also lost his job. Unfortunately for him, he did not
have a GPS tracklog at the time, so he had no way to prove his innocence.

My FlyMaster arrived and I was configuring it for work, when it died. It fully
bricked. It's under warranty, so it'll get sorted, but in the mean time, I'm
stuck. No GPS means no working.

My previous look at cell phone loggers yielded mixed results. I needed something
reliable and accurate.

I'm happy to say that it looks like Airtribune is going to do the trick. I
needed to force my phone to only use GPS data for location, but once I sorted
that, it's looking very accurate. What's better is that the website reviewer
shows AGL. So long as that proves accurate (enough), then we'll have a simple
and clear tool for proving compliance. A nice clear indicator is something the
ski field can feel good about too.

https://airtribune.com/feed

I got my first flights with Air Tribune today.

We flew from our much less sensitive site, so I haven't yet had the chance to
really field test it, but holy crap, why isn't everyone flying with this?

I thought, as I'm sure many do, of this as a live tracking solution, not a
regular, day to day GPS logger. This is a million times easier than any GPS
track logger I've ever used.

I showed it to a mate of mine and he was initially confused. He kept asking what
I did to upload the tracks and how you make it work in general, to which I just
responded: "you turn it on. that's it". The answer was too simple for him to
believe, so I showed him.

It is truly that simple. I had turned it on before our van arrived at the launch
site just to see how it would react. I expected that it would log my arrival,
setup and then the flight, but nope, it only logged the flight.

This is too blessed easy!

I also thought that you'd have to have phone data for it to work. Nope. It just
doesn't live track. This is so unbelievably cool.

I'll know soon if it's accurate enough to keep me out of trouble. I've got some
skips in my tracklogs from today, but I suspect that those are from placement
(obscuring the GPS signals)