sain

would mounting the existing glass in a brass plate be antique enough for you? or just a thin brass skin over the top of the existing metal?

Nice and simple OME. no fuel guage I take it? or battery voltage/ammeter?

kitplanes magazine has been publishing a bunch of articles on this topic over the last few months - might be worth a 6 month subscription so you can pull the archives off the web. The last one (I think, I read them out of order) had statistical cause-of-failure figures. Fuel starvation was suprisingly common - apparantly people forget to check the fuel flow through to the carby is happening.

isn't there already a mag in the states called Sports Pilot? Trademark infringement suit in 5...4...3...

Hi Emu, as a mater of interest are you planning on using the emachineshop service to cut the ribs out for you, or are you wanting to use your local guys for that?

I havn't got mine yet, but hey, i'm only 100km from the head office.

wouldn't that be $90 - he lost $5 twice after all. or is engineering maths different to programmer maths?

tor combined with privoxy is the preferred choice and provide difficult-to-break encryption for your surfing (in-transit). Downsides are its slower than normal surfing.

You need to be aware that whoever owns the tor exit node is able to see your traffic - so using it to log in to a site like Ian's (or your webmail or a porn site - whatever) is a bad idea. Using it to do all of those things is deeply moronic. never use it for anything that will link to anything that personally identifies you, or anything about you (like that you fly gyros in the northern end of australia - how many people do that)?

Pretty much the same thing applies to any anonymising service.

Best bet if you want to be "mostly anonymous". Use the internut as a read-only service. Don't post anything. ever. Don't visit sites that would/could attract attention (porn sites etc). Disable cookies. Disable Javascript. disable java. If feasable use a text-only browser. Do not use facebook or any other social networking site. Don't do anything that would make anybody care enough to look where your traffic might be coming from. Always remeber that other people can see what sites you visit, and unless its encrypted can read everything you read.

*edit* oh yeah - and only view traffic from the site you request - not from any other site.

I'd use standard nav light colours, so people who can figure out what direction they are approaching you from.

It might be best to hire a car trailer - you'll overhang by a good 3m or so otherwise.

for those who were wondering what Ian was talking about the article is here:

http://www.recreationalflying.com/forum/aviation-news/109809-robot-kill-chopper-goes-rogue-above-washington-dc-register.html

origional article here: ROBOT KILL-CHOPPER GOES ROGUE above Washington DC! ? The Register

Does anybody know anything much about the Lockwood Super Drifter? Its reviewed in the latest (Oct 2010) edition of Kitplanes, but apart from the Rotax 912s engine and the BRS it doesn't appear much different to the older drifters. It does seem to have a different nose cone.

Personally i think its great to see minimal style aircraft still being manufactured. The $45k price tag (with engine) does seem a little expensive though.

Interesting where this all got to.

Ron, for the other people looking at getting an off the shelf system, what product did you end up buying? was it the one Tony linked to before?

Greetings from aus!

I was wondering if any of our american (or any other country) bretheren are visiting oshkosh this year and could give us a run down on highlights, a trip report or something similair?

any takers?

My fool proof plan to fly more is to get a job as a casa inspector. Then show up at an airfield, pick a plane that looks fun and tell the owner that you are there to conduct a mandatory inspection on their aircraft. Give it a check over (make sure its safe enough), then tell them its time for the aloft portion of the inspection. For the stick time you tell the owner that you need to get a feel for any unsafe movement in the controls...

unfortunately casa doesn't want to talk to me about it.

Personally save like mad and fly a lot less than I'd like to.

There are cheaper ways to go flying too. Learning to fly in a glider is normally a lot cheaper than learning to fly in a powered aircraft. Mostly because you don't have to pay much towards the maintance of the noisy thermal generator (engine) and the fuel cost is much lower (samwiches!). Get your hours up in one of those and then change over.

Bones what operating system are you using? A lot of usb-serial converters have issues with windows 7 and vista due to the idiotic microsoft signed driver enforcement crapola.

If your using one of those systems try pressing f8 repeatedly before windows starts and you'll get a text menu with a bunch of options. Select "disable signed driver enforcement" and see how that goes. It'll only last until your next reboot though... (do it again if necessary).

I'm not really suprised - i suspect in reality that putco strobe doesn't flash very brightly. The electric current is a bit of a give away - most high output LEDs will draw much more than that - for a 6Watt output you would expect to see at least 500mA or so.

For those after a commercial, off the shelf unit one of these has been stuck on an aircraft before:

Clear Security Strobe Light SL-126 Clear - Smarthome

the $15.61 price tag is pretty hard to beat.

The post here: Voltage regulator options discusses it briefly, along with a voltage regulator to go with it. I'd be more inclined to use a low dropout voltage regulator, but the one suggested in that post should work (and apparantly does).

*edit* whups, thats not an LED strobe. my bad. still not bad though.

commercial units are available all over. I suspect you can even get some from Ian at clear prop (because Wicks aircraft supplies sells them).

Personally I think $200 for 6 1 watt LEDs is a rip off, even with the circuit to make them go blinky blinky and the nice clear dome. I've seen LED anti-collision lights for over $1000 (wicks for example), which is just insane.

I've been playing with maps downloaded from Geoscience Australia: MapConnect (.ecw files) OziExplorer has no problems using these maps and I've got them up and running on a Mio Moov A430 (I'd suggest buying a gps that has a SD card slot - it makes all the installation much easier.).

Its a free service and the maps are issued under the creative common's licensing.

The main downside is that it doesn't have all the aviation overlays (can show airstrips etc). I'm not overly concerned about that as we have to carry the paper charts anyway.

The other downside is the scale is 1:250 000, as opposed to the 1:500 000 the VNC charts are. Not really a huge problem, as if you can use im2ozf to convert the images to the OziExplorer image format and zoom out 50% at the same time.

I can provide my session file (has a bunch of overlay options I think might be useful turned on) if anybody wants to save themselves a couple of minutes. The maps are probably a tad on the busy side, but certainly usable.

I've also .ecw files downloaded for most of sth eastern nsw and eastern victoria (basically sydney to just north of melbourne, plus inland a fair way), which I'm happy to upload somewhere if people are interested.

Holy crap gibbo, thats a lot of data. nice work and thanks for the offer. If I get stuck with my playing around I'll send you a PM.

I'm currently playing with maps downloaded from geoscience australia, which I think will be good enough for my purposes for a while (given that we have to carry the charts as well anyway). Can I ask where you got the WAC and VNC overlays? I would like to incorporate them at some point.

Damn, I've been a bit slow of the mark - can anybody suggest an alternative source for electronic maps?

The other problem with ethanol as a fuel is its vapours are acidic, so it tends to corrode fuel tanks and other components more than unleaded does.

impressive ingenuity - using a disposable camera's flash for an aircraft strobe.

I imagine the 555 timer portion is fairly similair to 4aplat's.

I've heard a rumour that ACT Gov has aquired the land and construction has started - is anybody close enough to the group to confirm?