darryl ramm’s blog

It is pretty embarrassing when the premier news publication in Silicon Valley can’t get basic email to their readers right. Like not a clue.

I used to get one useful news summary email each morning from the Mercury News. I found it useful and I was more than happy to put up with the advertisements. Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting spammed a few times by the Mercury News with sponsored email from them on behalf of advertisers but the worst is that they seem to be doing insane experiments on their readers with poorly formatted html email. So badly formatted I will not read it. I’m using Yahoo!Mail Beta, but this stuff looks awful under Microsoft Outlook. It looks better under gmail but that’ s because gmail strips the background image, the text formatting and column layout is still awful.

I mean why would anybody with even the slightest clue about html portability try to stick background images in html emails? The screen shots show yesterday’s email rendered in Yahoo!Mail (Beta) and in Microsoft Outlook 2003.

There is just no need for attempting the overly complicated html formatting they are trying to do, and even if the design changes were justified there is no need to be slamming experiments out to all their reader base until have the formatting stable. Oh and you would think that they had email preferences for receiving plain text emails instead of mis-formatted html. Think again (or good luck finding them if they exist). That link at the top “If you cannot see this newsletter correctly, please see out online version here” needs the “If” replaced with a “Since”. Sigh.

It is just about the start of another soaring season so I’ve had my glider annual inspection performed and getting other things ready including having my emergency parachute repacked. While doing that I also dropped of some of BASA’s (my gliding club) parachutes for a repack.

Emergency parachutes have to be repacked every 120 days. This allows an inspection of the condition of the parachute and case, and internal items such a the rubber bands that hold the parachute lines in place. I have my parachute repacked by Allen Silver at Silver Parachute. Allen is a FAA master parachute rigger, an aerobatic pilot and specializes in repacks of parachutes for glider and aerobatic pilots. He has several thousand parachute jumps under his belt, I have none and will be happy to keep it that way.

Anybody who uses an emergency parachute should attend one of Allen’s talks on care and use of emergency parachutes, get your parachute harness adjusted properly by Allen and do an ‘executive repack’ where he walks through doing a repack on your chute while you are there. That way you’ll learn a lot about the parachute and whats inside the pack.

One thing that Allen encourages before a repack, and I always do, is to put your parachute on go though the steps of a simulated bail out (protect your face/head, eject canopy, release harness, fight your way out of the cockpit, head first over the side if possible, look for and grab the ripcord, keep your legs together if you can, pull the ripcord, throw away the ripcord handle, look up and grab the steering handles, etc…). You can see me pulling the ripcord in the top photo on the left. The coil spring loaded pilot chute is flying out of the pack. The other photos show Allen holding the pilot chute, the parachute steering handles (gold colored in this case), and the rubber bands holding the parachute risers in place in the pack.

Allen has several articles on emergency parachute use and care available here.

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I purchased a Clarity Aloft headset for use in my motor glider. The Clarity Aloft is a passive in-ear headset that uses Comply brand foam earbud tips to provide great noise isolation.

The switch box on the Clarity Aloft has a master volume control, an 2.5mm stereo audio jack for auxilary input for music or cell phone and a stereo/mono switch. Since it is entirely passive there is no radio mute on the auxilary input. The headset looks well made and is comfortable to wear, even while wearing sunglasses and an oxygen cannula hooked over my ears. I think the headset will just hang over my neck when not in use.

Some people hate how in-ear style phones feel, but I already have several very nice phones from Etymotic Research for music listing (middle photo at left) and really like them. The Etymotic ear phones come with several different types of ear plug tips, including their standard soft plastic white flanged tips and Comply foam tips on some models. Etymotic claim 35 dB isolation for the white three flange tips and 41db isolation for the Comply foam tips.

Other motor glider pilots using earphones with Comply tips have complained that it can be inconvenient to have to squeeze and mess around inserting the foam tips in your ear especially when needing to do a quick in-air engine start. The Etymoics white plastic tips by comparison just plug in without needing to be squeezed or rolled between your fingers first.

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In late 2005 I installed a large (64W) solar panel on the Cobra trailer for my DG-303 glider and it has worked great. I get asked about the solar panels, so I thought I’d save some information here about it, largely stuff that has been posted in the past to private newsgroups. I’m going to be installing a similar set up on my ASH-26E trailer, but I may play with different charge controllers (more on that in future).

My DG-303 has dual 12 amp hour batteries. I have two sets of two batteries, so I can always have a set charging while the others are in use. I wanted to also be able to leave all four batteries in the trailer hooked up to the solar panel when the glider is not in use. With my glider the batteries need to be removed from the glider for disassembly so it made sense to just make a mount for four batteries in the trailer rather than charge some in the fuselage of the glider parked in the trailer.

I wanted a significant amount of solar power available; something like enough to fully charge a fairly well used pair of batteries on a good sunny day. This meant a large panel with charge controllers, a place to mount four batteries and one or more solar charge controllers depending on the charging scheme. All up costs for this project was around $600 - it could be done for less without some of the over engineering in my set up.

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This is a lingering memory of Christmas, which for me is a lot about kids with annoying toys, toys that don’t work, wrong size batteries (if you remembered them at all…), toys that just suck.

I’m not a big fan of shooting toys for kids but one of our neighbours gave my son this ray gun for Christmas that is supposed to shoot out foam disks. I saw it on Christmas day and then noticed it was back in it’s box. My son said it did not work and asked me if I could fix it.

I just got so busy I forgot about it until now. And he has had to bug me several times to look at it, so by now I’m feeling like a very negligent parent.

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Thanks to the folks at Alexander-Schleicher it seems I do have an ASH-26E after all. Another glider under completion in the factory. The plain blue stripe will go — and will be replaced by the modern style multicolored swoosh. This glider has no instrument panel so I’m running to get instruments sorted out. It has a fiberglass top trailer already with it which will get swapped for an aluminium top trailer.

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I spent the last two week trying to jump through hoops and buy the order position for an Alexander Schleicher ASH-26E motor glider currently under construction in Germany. It would have meant having a great motor glider here for the peak of this years soaring season. Unfortunately the deal with the current purchaser fell through when he changed his mind and decided to keep the glider. Things were happening so quick and the glider was on such a quick delivery timeframe that I was crunching through options and panel configurations. I even had checked on insurance and started to reserve a N-number. Sigh. So I’m left without a glider but with a panel layout that I like.

I used the Word document from Schleicher that has a graphical panel layout in it. Not sure why they distribute it in Word. I copied the graphic elements over to PowerPoint and also hacked them with Photoshop and some images to mock up what it would look like. Who knows if everything on the panel would have been able to fit perfectly.

Big things for me are the 3 1/8″ United Instruments 5934 series altimeter, a larger airspeed indicator is also nice and if possible using Klixon circuit breakers on the panel instead of the usual fuses. The Altimeter is really important for me, after sitting in a ASH-26E and looking at the 2 1/4″ diameter 20,000′ Winter altimeter it just looks very small and difficult to read compared to the larger 3 1/8″ diameter United altimeter that I fly with now.

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I’ve posted most of this in the past to some newsgroups, but people keep asking about the PDA mounts I have in my DG-303 so here we go.. after experimenting with different options I settled on the mounting arrangement shown in the photos above and I really like how they work.

I use HP iPAQ hx4700 PDAs, these are relatively high end PDAs that are no longer in production but may still be available, at least used ones. The hx4705 was the same PDA sold through different channels. The hx4700 have 4″ diagonal transflective VGA resolution (640×480 pixel) screens. I run SeeYou Mobile so the processor power of the hx4700 is useful but the PDAs are not perfect, more on that below. I have the 3600 mAh extended Li-ion battery packsinstaled that allow the PDAs to operate with a CF card GPS for something like 6-8 hours — providing a backup navigation system if everything else fails in the glider. Failing that I’ve got a compass and sectional charts and I’m not afraid to use them.

Although I’m using hx4700s many of the comments below will apply to all PDAs.

Almost all color PDAs use transflective displays, these do not work well in sunlight. The best thing to do is to get the PDA close to your face and pretty vertical looking straight at you. You don’t want to be looking down at a PDA angled partially up at the sky as it will reflect a lot of light back off the screen. I tried the PDAs with bare screens and with the Boxwave ClearTouch Anti-Glare screen protectors which do improve visibility in daylight a little. Make sure you get the ClearTouch Anti-Glare not ClearTouch Crystal screen protectors.

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Naviter has released improved resolution Landsat imaging for for their SeeYou soaring planning and analysis software. A nice improvement in resolution as you can see from the screen shots on the left. These screen shots show part of a flight I made last year from Minden Douglas Airport (KMEV) in Nevada. The 38th north parallel runs through KEMV. In these screen shots you see the new higher resolution imaging south of the 38th parallel and the previous resolution imaging to the north.

The release of improved resolution terrain imagery for SeeYou is likely a slow (there is no reason to hurry) response to Sierra SkyWare releasing WinPilot 3D to compete with SeeYou. One of the leading benefit claims Sierra SkyWare was making for Winpilot 3D was its 3D visualization and imaging resolution. 3D visualization is one of the sexier features of SeeYou so this was pretty much a frontal assault on SeeYou.

A frontal assault on the dominant market leader, including where when there are already other vendors (StrePla) in a market segment just does not sound like good strategy for me. You can run up to the castle and pound on the gates and not many people will care. But if you manage to annoy the owner of the castle enough they pour a little boiling oil over you, and you either die or you leave, a lot worse for wear…

In swapping around PCs and laptops recently I needed a backup solution. I ended up with a LaCie 500GB Brick drive and like it so much I’ll write about it (and pimp it for Amazon). LaCie has a whole series of these brick drives designed by French designer Ora-Ïto. They are not only cute but also practical.

As well as backups I needed a way to move hundreds of gigabytes around, for things like syncing a large iTunes library between PCs at different locations. Far too much data and updated too much to want to use DVD+RW/-RW drives. An external USB drive was clearly the way to go.

So I went looking at drives at local retailers. While there was quite a selection available I managed to find fault with many of the drives, including -

• Suspect looking construction quality
• Vertical standing drives that I was worried would fall over
• Light weight drives and/or poor feet that could easily slide off the desk

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