ianboag

I think it needs to be understood that my page should under no circumstances ever be used by someone who needs to understand anything about today's flying weather. The relevant information for this is available in crystal-clear ICAO-compliant gobbledegook from a BOM/Airservices gibberish page. Come to think of it, you can even find the gibberish off a link on this site - without an Airservices login even. CAR 120 (aka Rule Part 175) has nothing to do with my product. What I have done is just another variant of the non-warranted web page translations produced by Babelfish and the like. The NZ CAA figured that out already with the Kiwi equivalent - they (grumpily?) figured that they couldn't lay the necessity for Rule Part 175 compliance on me. It's sort of like the GPS's that a few of us have in our aircraft. They contain regularly updated (?) non-certified Jeppesen maps that we never use as primary navigational aids because only (the sometimes only slightly out of date) A1 wallpaper is legal for that. We have Garmin x9x's with Jeppesen maps as a form of airborne TV to fill in the boring bits of cross country flight. It's really important that we ensure the regulators who control aviation should be respected for the thankless job they do. They should be left to get on with ensuring our skies are safe. Any unwarranted and unworthy suspicions - eg that they are be protecting sinecure-type jobs by dreaming up and pretending to enforce regulations that occasionally don't make sense - are totally unwarranted. They care about all of us. :-) IB

Fixed.

I did some of that in the NZ version after someone made the same points about AMSL/AGL stuff. Real pilots know all that of course - it goes with fluency in gibberish. What's the link where I can find the info? I'm a Kiwi remember. It would be nice if I could find a way to get some $$$ for this :-)

I agree completely. Personally I think that figuring these things out is a whole lot easier if the information doesn't have to be translated out of gibberish first. The gibberish adds nothing to the process other than a degree of international standardisation which ensures the AVMET is the same PITA for everyone around the world.

I did it as a training tool of course. Everyone needs fluency in Avmet gibberish - it must be something that makes the sky safer or the regulators wouldn't insist on it :-)

You could load the ERSA pdf into Paint Shop Pro (or something similar) and save the airfield plate as a JPG. The photo viewer on the GPS should deal OK with that ......

Every request we get for data is reviewed from a safety, regulatory and legal aspect, and is not just released without due consideration. Nice. Wow. I mean - ask yourself - how long has this "review" been going on? Will there still be enough oil to fly aircraft when the "due consideration" is done? Maptrax indicated that the numbers were quite low and that was why it was not financially viable for them. That's why Airservice are going to charge more than Maptrax did - for a product that they "manufacture" at essentially zero cost. They won't retain the original geo-references because everyone wants them in different formats and they couldn't keep up with the technology. More brilliant non-thinking! If they released one format with the georefs in it, people who wanted something else could convert the format and retain the (100% accurate because it came from the GIS) georeferencing. This way - if all you get is pdfs - you have to georef it by hand which is (a) a colossal waste of time and (b) inferior. You are trying to recreate (tediously by hand) a function that is in their mapmaking computer system and they have purposely withheld. That a very "customer focussed" thing to do. I wonder if Sentient have to do their own georeffing for their Airnav product or do AirServices give them something already georefed? You can scan the paper charts only if you buy a license from Airservices. Minimum fee is $275. Yeah right. Lots of people scan relevant bits from charts for when they are going somewhere. It's not hard to do and the result is easy to use in a cockpit. $275. Wow! They are also worried about inadequately regulated provision of data being an increased safety risk - even though we cannot use this data as a primary means of navigation. Who regulates what goes into TSO'd GPS's? And we should beleive that noone anywhere flies round with last year's wallpaper in the cockpit ... we must all be carrying the current sheets. Must be the case because I've not ever read of a prosecution for flying with out of date maps. Slarti - we need to see the error of our ways here and accept that A1 sheets in the cockpit are the 100% accepted time-proven only safe way to use a map in flight. GPS's are an invention of the devil - one day the airlines will see the light and stop using them. The technology they are really looking for is something that makes paper charts self-destruct on their expiry date. :-) The CAR 233 thing is another red herring. It's for organisations that set themselves up as providers of aeronautical information. I almost had that laid on me for my plain-language-MET site in NZ. You would deal with that the same way that the GPS manufacturers do. Just write "not for navigational purposes" a few times so it displays reasonably prominently where a reasonable person can't miss it. Noone lays CAR 233 on Garmin or Lowrance. IB

That's soooooo novel. The pdfs were what they used to make available to MapTrax. A dollar gets you five that their contractor's GIS would spit out georeffed tiffs with a button push. But it's more fun for us to take charts where they have removed the georef info so we can - with some difficulty - recreate an imperfect version of it. I think you asked here the wrong question. Ask her is it OK for you to georef the pdf's and convert them to ozfx3, then sell THAT to people who (tell you they have) paid for the pdf's. Expect an answer "soon" (before the year 20xx). Just because this is all buzzing round their smoko room doesn't mean anything will happen in less than a geological time span. Probably best not to mention the bracketed bit. We're all honest here. The "selling" is just for your georef and conversion work. IB

One last try. I buy (licence) a set of paper maps. I scan/georef them to put in my GPS or whatever. Personal use etc - format-shifting "my" (paid for and licenced) maps from paper to ozfx3. However, my mate Fred (who has also bought (licenced) a set of maps) wants a similar set of scans so he can put them into a GPS or whatever for his personal use. Like me he has already paid AirServices for the (wall)paper charts. If it's OK for me to have scanned stuff, it's OK for him. It is not OK for me to sell/give him scans if he does not have a set of purchased paper charts. That would be violation of copyright. IB

Maybe this week?

So I have scanned my (legitimately purchased) paper charts for my own use. No matter what the law says, noone is going to give me any grief for that. My mate Fred sees that and ask if I can scan his (legitimately purchased) paper charts. "Sure thing" I say and I charge him for the scan/copy job. What's wrong with that? IB

The real answer of course is for Airservices and CASA to realise that in the 21st century, some people want other things beside wallpaper-sized maps. They first of all have to worry about the safety of all this - A1 size maps have been proven over many years to be totally safe and 100% usable in cockpit environment. Just ask someone who wants to go cross country in a Pitts Special :-) Part of their reluctance to release digital maps may be that we can't be trusted with them. Imagine someone making decisions of a moving-map VNC in a Chinese GPS. Needs a bit of thought really. Shouldn't take more than another couple of years.

I don't think I was clear enough .... Suppose I have a set of paper maps. I make a digital copy myself (scan and georef) so I can use them in my Moov. Suppose you also have a set of paper maps. You ask me to make a digital version for you because you lack the skills to do it. I give/sell you a copy of my scans. The selling is to reimburse me for doing the scanning job. I can't just give you my copy because that would be copyright violation. I can use my skills to convert your paper one to an ozfx3 for you though.

Why would Joe be less than truthful? Me I think people are fundamentally honest. :-) If Joe tells you he owns paper maps and you remember to warn him not to pass any copies of the digital ones around to people who don't have paper maps it would seem to me that you have covered yourself .....

Yes to give away your copyright maps to someone is indeed illegal. Unless of course they already own some paper maps. If that's the case, then this is just format-shifting. It's like me asking you to rip my CD so I can play it in my iPod. My CD, my iPod. So - if someone asks you for a copy of the digital maps, you should confirm that they own a copy of the relevant paper map. If the buyer tells you that he has some, then of course it's not unreasonable to give him (or even sell him!) copies that have been converted to ozfx3 format. As far as I know, format-shifting is sort of illegal, but has never been enforced. Format-shifting for personal use seems to be sort of accepted as too hard to do anything about. The recording industry gave up on it and they are a pretty tenacious lot. Go figure. Ask Airservices about format-shifting and wait for the cloud of smoke. IB

I don't know about the Mio Moov, but I have now fooled about with a few Chinese Win CE GPS's of different anonymous brands. They all have a "setup" button on the front page - if you select it one of the oprions is - "nav path" or "GPS path" or something like that. So if you set up OziExplorer on an SD card and stick it into the GPS - you will be able to select \whatever_the_card_is_called\oziexplorer\oziexplorerCE.exe as the navigation app. After doing this, when you select "GPS" off the front screen you get OziExplorer. When you want to use it in a car, you just go back to setup and change the app back to whatever it used to be ... So it isn't really necessary to "unlock" it - this is a slightly kludgy but not difficult approach to making a $160 car GPS into something that gives a $1300 Garmin Aera a bit of a fright. The other thing I have been looking at is the problem of reflective screens - 3M have a 50mm wide clear duct tape that makes quite a difference when applied to the screen. Actually regular old invisible Scotch tape is not bad, but of course it only comes 15mm wide so the result is not real pretty ... Cheers IB

Orright guys orright. I have written "I will never squirt SYB into my engine again" 500 times. You lot are like someone who sees me having a glass of wine with dinner and launches into a story about liver failure :-) Jab forums (this one, Yahoo and the UK one) do have a lot of annual posts about cold starting problems though. I have heard of - jumper cables - hot water on carb - 20 minutes of electric heater into the bottom cowl hole - various things about earth wires on starters - ether The drill-out-the-choke-jet one was one I hadn't heard. In the end when mine had constant cold starting issues I just modified it to have two batteries, because jump starting it on the external wire I had under the cockpit always worked. No further problems after that. It may of course have introduced a new hazard that I didn't think of. IB

True. My error. It takes 2-3 revs to suck out the airbox, not 1-1.5 ... IB

I completely take the point that diesels with a bottle of ether attached - and a button to keep squirting it - can have a problem. That's not what I am talking about. When I use ether on a cold day, I put a puff of the stuff into the intake, then get into the plane and crank it ... Generally it's puff puff vroom vroom. Used this way there is enough ether vapour in the system to provide one stroke's worth of volatile high flammability fuel that gets to the cylinder and eats a spark. Used this way it's hard to "flood" it or use "too much". The ether is a vapour - if I do "too long a puff" the ether vapour just overflows back out the intake. A 3300 engine sucks 3.3 litres of air/rev. The induction box is maybe 5 litres .... so all the air in the box is sucked through in 1-1.5 revs. The "engine problem" faced here is a reluctance to start from cold when the oil is thick, the battery is not at its best and fuel doesn't seem to get to the cylinders as vapour. Reduce the effect of any of these and the beast will go. Once it has started and run for a little while the problem goes away. Cheers IB

Hi Tomo Can you quote me an authoritative source for that opinion? The Jab is a pretty simple not-very-high compression four stroke. If you give it a pre-start puff, the ether is all through in a couple of engine revs. How much harm can that do? I'm not trying to yank any chains here - I just want to understand. IB

Start Ya Bastard That's the brand on the ether can from Super Cheap. Always worked for me .....

Information Hey Slarti - have you made that "next week" call to AirServices yet? Did they give you all the good oil or was it a cloud of smoke?

Possible applied lunacy I think this is how it works. Airservices (or their map contractor) have a GIS system. It keeps everything in a big digital database mishmash that can be output in various forms. I would be willing to bet that geopdf or geotiff files are in the list of ways the data can be outputted at the push of a button. These are georeferenced files ie they have embedded lat/long info. That's what a GPS or Sentient need. Another format is a pdf for the printer. This is just a picture WITH ALL THE GEOREFERENCING TAKEN OUT. This is all that Maptrax could get, so Maptrax MANUALLY HAD TO PUT BACK ALL THE GEOREFERENCING THAT HAD BEEN TAKEN OUT. How clever is that? What century are we supposed to be in? Why can't Airservices just spit out the georeferenced stuff themselves for us flyers?

Send me your email and I'll forward you my correspondence ....

The charts are copyright, so whoever Torrents them will need to be anonymous. Not real hard. This is a typical example of what Overpaid Unaccountable Drongoes (OUDs) can do in a corporate environment. People who get paid for going to work and not for what they produce. Maptrax want to provide georeferenced files. People want to buy them. Airservices no doubt have software that will do that by pressing a button. Airservices can't be bothered figuring out how to sell them. The only thing that AirServices offer Maptrax is printer pdfs. Pictures with all georeferencing removed. Because they already had them to send to the printer and there was ZERO time/cost involved. So MapTrax take what they are offered by an Airservices OUD. MAptrax recreate (by hand) all the georeferencing (that was in an earlier version of the file) at a non-significant cost and time. Remember that these pdfs for Maptrax cost AirServices ZERO. They are the pdfs that were going to the printer anyway .... Then some AirServices OUD decides they should up the price because they can. So sales fall to zero as price increase has pushed Maptrax out of the market. Now Airservices get zero for selling the digital chart rights. Maptrax lose revenue. The OUD still gets paid the same. Well done. In the real world we would know who the OUD is (he/she has a name and job description). One assumes that the OUD's pay packet is not going to be influenced by his/her brainless decision. He/she is probably putting in an application for a pay rise this year based on he/she now having more experience. So who are you Mr/Ms OUD? Fess up. Why did you do it? Addendum - I forgot - OUDs prefer to roam in packs called "committees" ..