Rants and Revelations

Start this off with a look back at last years, because for once I did a pretty fair job.

Here are my resolutions from last year:

break 20 minutes in the Baycreek time trial

I actually broke 19 minutes, so chalk that one up as a win.

finish the Long Lake Long Boat Regatta long race (9 miles)

I didn’t just finish, I came in 5 seconds behind Mike Finear, after dragging him in my wake for several miles. Another win.

figure out if I want to continue flying or not.

Gave up flying, didn’t really miss it. Found myself obsessing over every mistake I ever made in the air and about how blasé I was about the danger at the time. Trying to tell myself that’s because I was on my game back then so I could handle it, and now I’m out of practice I wouldn’t handle it so easily if it happened now. Can’t tell if that means I should never go back, or if I need to really practice a lot if I go back.

develop an ajax web site, using either GWT or jquery or ruby on rails or something

I started an iPhone app, but hit a snag and put it aside. Realized that the GWT web site would be a better help with my job search, and made some half decent progress on this before I actually got a job.

diet

That went pretty well. Between February and June I lost 40 pounds and then hit a plateau. Unfortunately it’s the same plateau I hit every time I go on a diet. Spend most of the fall still within spitting distance of being on the diet (it’s hard to be strict when you’re home all day) but not losing any weight. However, I think I was building some muscle mass in my arms and core, so maybe it wasn’t all that bad. Managed to gain 10 pounds of it back between Thanksgiving and now. Still a win, I think.

exercise

Yeah, pretty much. I started out the year being barely able to paddle 2 miles, and now a 10 mile workout holds no terror for me. Still trying to figure out how to keep that fitness over the off season. (Yeah, I know, “Off season? What’s that?” – getting out to paddle once in a blue moon is no substitute for paddling three or four times a week)

get a better job

Well, it took until a week before Christmas, but I got a decent contract job. Hopefully it will lead to more decent jobs.

once more subject myself to the psychological torture of trying to get more treatment for my pain

I didn’t actually do anything about this one. But between not having to sit at a desk, not having to drive much, losing weight and exercising more, my knees weren’t that bad. Of course after a week of driving 3 hours a day to my new job, my knees are now the worst they’ve been since back when I used to drive to Ottawa twice a month. Hopefully that will recover now that I’m working more from home.

1600×1200

How about 1920×1080 on the left, and 1920×1200 on the right. Now *that* is resolution, baby!

That was the year that was. This is my list for this year:

• Break 17:30 in the Baycreek Time Trial. I’d like to break 17, but I think 17:30 is more attainable.
• Join NYMCRA and start competing for points. I’d like to do at least 5 of the points races this year, but they haven’t put out the 2010 calendar yet so I don’t know which ones those will be. Last year I did Tupper Lake, Armond Bassett, and Long Lake, and I could easily extend that to 5 by doing Round The Mountain or Bear Mountain and the long course at the Rochester Open Water Challenge. I probably won’t get a lot of points, because unlike the other guys I don’t get any handicap points because I’m not over 50 and my Thunderbolt is Unlimited Class. If I’m reading the points system right, at Long Lake I would have gotten 85 points because although I was only 5 seconds behind Mike F, he got handicap time for being in an EFT, a Touring Class boat and time for being over 50, so his adjusted time is 3:34 ahead of me. Competing for points might add a new twist to races, but mostly I see it as a reason to go to more races.
• Start building up my training volume. This year my GPS recorded 670 miles of kayaking, and that’s not including the early part of the season before I bought it, and the few times I forgot to charge the damn thing. I’d like to increase both the number of paddles and the length of them. If I can manage a few 20 mile plus days, I’d be slowly working towards doing the “90 Miler”, maybe in 2011 as a 50th birthday thing.
• Get the diet back on track and try to break through this plateau I was stuck at this fall.
• Finish revamping my navaid.com site into GWT so it doesn’t look like something designed in 1992, which it probably was.
• Figure out the GRIB thing that Laurie wants me to do.
• Hold onto this job, or find another one quickly when it ends.
• And that’s about it for the public ones.

Hopefully I’ll do as well this year as I did last.

(Climb, Conserve, Confess is the mantra for pilots who are lost – climb up in case there are obstacles around, lean the engine and fly conservatively in case you’re far off course, and contact local ATC or Flight Service to “confess” and see what help they might offer you, like radar vectors or a “DF Steer”.)

Yesterday I went flying with a club member who is a CFII (an instrument instructor) who wanted a safety pilot. What I hadn’t known ahead of time is that because he’s an instructor he wanted me to sit in the left seat and fly some of the time. Not only that, but because he was an instrument instructor, I could log the approaches towards my IFR currency.

As I was doing the pre-start checklist, he said that he would work the radios while I flew, and then I would work the radios while he flew. I’ve never done that before, and it was confusing. The first confusion was that because he said he was going to work the radios, I expected him to turn off the avionics master when I went to start the engine. He didn’t, and I didn’t, and the noise through the intercom while the starter motor was cranking was horrendous. I should probably note at this time that while doing the pre-start checklist, I noticed the autopilot flashing strangely, and neither of us knew what it meant. After the engine turned twice and didn’t catch, the battery died and so I think we discovered what it meant. We jump started the airplane with the cart, and it ran fine, and the autopilot wasn’t flashing any more. I vaguely recall that the autopilot flashes when there was a low voltage condition.

I did the first approach, the ILS to 28. Jim surprised very mild surprise that I loaded up the real ILS approach on the GPS instead of a GPS approach. But hey, to me an ILS is a real approach and everything else is a pale substitute, even an LNAV+VNAV. It wasn’t the greatest ILS ever, and Jim kept telling me to correct this way and that, mostly stuff I would have done even without him. It seemed like I was doing the infamous “s-turns down the localizer”, then I remembered where to see the ground track on the GPS and used that to get settled down.

Then it was Jim’s turn, and in spite of the fact that he is a CFII, and he’s much more current than I, he too ended up doing s-turns down the localizer. We discussed it, and considering that both of us had the same trouble, plus how bumpy it was, we figured there were some shifting winds at different altitudes and that was throwing us both off.

Then it was my turn again, and since we’d just taken off from runway 22 and were requesting the ILS for runway 28, we ended up getting vectored to the south of the airport. The air was much smoother there. My second approach went amazingly well. I got a nice gentle turn to the localizer well outside the marker, in contrast to the nearly 90 degree turns we had gotten less than a mile outside the marker on the first two approaches, and the air was smooth, and plus I was using the ground track indication, so I did almost ATP quality approach, with both needles one dot and maybe occasionally two dots off all the way down.

But as we continued off runway 28 and asked for the ILS 28 again for Jim’s turn, they turned us right to the north of the airport, and once again it was getting very bumpy. And when you combine early in the year, bumps, and flying under the hood, for me that means airsick. So I reluctantly told Jim that we’d have to make this the last one. I don’t know whether it’s because we intercepted it from the bumpy north instead of the smooth south, or because I was felling sick and so felt the bumps more or because I wasn’t flying, but it seemed like it was much worse than when I’d done it, both in terms of the bumps and Jim seemed to be having much more trouble keeping the needles centered than I did. But then again, he adamantly refused to use the GPS ground track – he said it was “cheating”. I’ve heard it said for air combat, and I apply it for IFR flying, if you aint cheating, you aint trying hard enough. The plan was to do the ILS 28, do a touch and go, and join the pattern for 25, and I told the approach controller that, although more likely I should have waited to talk to the tower controller.

Now comes the confession part. I mentioned before I wasn’t used to this “pilot non-flying works the radios”. A few times previously I’d either gone to say something on the radio when Jim was working the radios, or waited for Jim to say something before I realized I was supposed to do it. Also, both radios had “flip-flop” alternate frequencies. Jim used the first radio for the tower frequency and the second for the approach frequency. But the approach frequency was also the alternate frequency on radio one. So when we took off from 28, I’d used the flip-flop to switch to the approach. And I didn’t think anything of it, until taking off from our touch and go on 28 that I realized we were still on the approach frequency. A terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach joined the already building air-sickness. I don’t know if I missed a radio call, but I just let us do a touch and go without a clearance, without even talking to the tower. The neither the approach controller nor the tower controller mentioned it, although instead of just directly joining the pattern for 25, we got a bit of a vector to the south and then back in again.

So here is my confession: I didn’t switch frequencies, I didn’t talk to the tower, and let us land without a clearance when it was my job to do all that. Time to fill out a NASA ASRS form.

Last summer I donated a sight seeing flight to a charity auction a friend was running. That, of course, was before my gear was stolen, and before I started spending all my time kayaking instead of flying. Since coming back from Oshkosh in August, I’ve only logged 1 hour of flying time.

But I got a call from the winner this week, wanting to go. The weather forecast for this weekend wasn’t bad, if a little colder than I’d like, so I decided to go up Saturday and practice flying a bit and do my three landings for currency requirements, and then take them on Sunday. It actually worked out well – both days I got there just as somebody else was finished with the plane, so it was well warmed up. Both days the wind was coming from the east, which is a bit unusual here, and that caused some mechanical turbulence from the hills in that direction.

On Saturday I went out to Batavia to do some landings (and incidentally stop for $3.79 gas instead of the $5.40 gas at Rochester) and then visited my old sight-seeing favourites like the Perry wind farm (which has grown immensely since the last time I was there), and the trestle at Letchworth, and Irondequoit bay. I was surprised to find some open water in the south end of the bay, but of course still lots of ice fishers still out on the frozen part. Oh, and the entire creek looks like it’s open, so I can’t wait for it to be warm enough to paddle!

It was strange to be out flying again. It was nice to feel that feeling of accomplishment again. But by the same token, just buzzing around the same old sights just isn’t all that exciting. I think I need to find something new to do in the air – maybe organize a trip to the Air Museum in Dayton, or something.

Sunday I actually managed to find the guy’s house. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to, because as a non-pilot, he wasn’t really good at answering questions like “are there any nearby water towers” or “can you recognize that school over there”? But his brother in the back seat said “isn’t that it right underneath us”, and sure enough it was. They’re actually just outside the edge of the Rochester class C airspace, so the controller asked what we were doing as we were circling around. Fortunately the traffic was pretty light and it wasn’t bothering anybody. After that, we headed down to Letchworth, and then back up to Irondequoit and Sea Breeze. Then we headed back in to the airport, giving them a good view of the downtown and U of R. And as usual, my approach wasn’t great, not all that well stabilized, but I made a very smooth touch down.

Check out this utterly awesome picture taken of a Yak aerobatic trainer taken with a iPhone:

Airplane Prop + CMOS Rolling Shutter = WTF on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

The combination of the slow scan speed of the camera and the movement of the prop has done something fascinating to the image. In the old days, some cameras had moving slits for shutters and they did similar effects to propellors, but usually the props just looked a little bent, rather than discombobulated.

Ok, so what do I want from an iPhone App? How about I list the requirements as I see them, and order them from highest to lowest? I have an idea that I can then choose a bunch at the top of the list and say “this will be the first release”, then a bunch below that to say “this will be the next release”, and so on down the list.

The perfect iPhone logbook app:

• Must not require an internet connection!
• User must be able to enter a new flight.
• User must be able to browse existing flights.
• User must be able to total up existing flights
• A flight consists of a brief description, a series of one or more locations, the aircraft that was taken, and the number of hours spent in certain activities such as “Pilot in Command”, “Cross Country”, “Dual Instruction” as well as counts of other non-timed activities like “Day Landings” or “Precision Approaches”.
• A particular aircraft should be known by its capabilities so that the user can get totals of time spent in those capabilities, such as single engine or multi engine, land plane or sea plane, complex, high performance, turbo prop, jet, etc.
• User should be able to filter on date ranges, capabilities, aircraft flown, activities logged, etc, in both the browse and total functions, so, for example, you can total up how many flights you took where you made a night landing in a complex aircraft while pilot in command, or see all the flights where you landed in Syracuse (KSYR).
• User should be given warnings of “currency” items, based either on recently logged flights, like if you’ve gone 90 days without 3 day or night landings, of for calendar items like when your medical expires.
• User could track other things in the flight, such as who else flew with you or flight number that would be filter-able
• User could have an unstructured note field to note down other facts about the flight that are not filter-able.
• User could export the flight log to a Google Docs spreadsheet. (Some other iPhone apps do this – I wonder if there is an API?) (Obviously an internet connection would be required during this operation)
• User could import the flight log from a Google Docs spreadsheet. (I have no idea if that’s even possible!)
• User could customize the duration and count fields for flights.
• User could customize the rules for currency, even combining several factors.
• Application could publish an interface so that other apps (like CoPilot, for example), could transfer information from a flight that was planned or flown into the logbook.

That should keep me busy for a while, eh? Any additions?

I was up to 2:30am last night, and up again at 8:30, working on a problem with PostgreSQL. I spent a week and a half consolidating the data that comes from OurAirports.com and my existing data, and trying to figure out who was right when they disagree. I finally got that finished up at around 8pm last night, but didn’t load it on the production machine until after I got back from a party around midnight.
Continue reading ‘PostgreSQL woes’ »

I just got a check for my share of the money Laurie Davis got from selling his new CoPilot for iPhone on the iTunes app store. If you just count the time I spent re-designing my database to accomdate the requirements of his app, writing the web app to provide the data for his app, and re-writing the load scripts to load in the new database format, I figure I earned about $50/hour. If you count all time I’ve spend on building and maintaining this database and web site, add in the money I’ve gotten from donations, and ignore the money I’ve spent on web hosting for navaid.com, and I figure I earned about $.00001/hour.

Still, it’s sure nice to have this check. Of course, my first impulse it is to blow it on something cool for myself, but on sober second thought I should probably bank (most of) it against a future jobless spell.

I’ve been trying to import the data from David Megginson’s great OurAirports.com site into my Navaid.com site. The reason I want to do this is that they have a lot of data that I don’t. They crowd-source a lot of it, but some of the initial data loads come from sources that I never found for my site. My site, on the other hand, tries to get data from various data sources and merges it with other data from other authoritative sources like from the FAA (and the sadly obsolete DAFIF).
Continue reading ‘How I spent my winter vacation’ »

I’ve written earlier about how I have flown so little this year that I’m seriously considering going “inactive” in the club? Well, on top of that, I’ve been Secretary for the club for most of the time I’ve been a member – I think it started soon after I created a web site for the club on my own. I suck at it. I’m not organized enough, and I don’t like doing it. I got free of it once, but the person who took it on quit after a year or two and dumped it back on me.

And the club communications are now totally dysfunctional. There is a “officers” mailing list for officers and board members to communicate, but the current president of the club, and a couple of others, totally refuse to use it. Instead, they send email to long lists of CCs, which means that you personally have no control over what email address you receive the message, or in what format. It also means that sometimes you find out that a conversation is going on because sometime in the middle of it somebody stops hitting “Reply All” and uses their own address list. One extremely annoying example of this happened when the club officers and BOD were discussing selling the Lance (which I knew about) but didn’t include me in most of a long thread about some of the details in spite of the fact that I was one of three members of the club who used the Lance, I was one of two officers who used the Lance, and the detail they were discussing had to do with on-line advertising. Anyway, the President last year said “I can see why people would want the email list, but I’ll continue to use my own list”, and subscribed. But sometime between then and now he’s unsubscribed again (which I didn’t know). Meanwhile, he’s stubbornly using his alias list (which includes people who haven’t been officers in 4 or 5 years and who don’t live in the US any more), and I’m stubbornly using the mailing list.

So last night (it’s now 3:30am and I haven’t been able to sleep all night because I’m so riled up about this) he sent me an email basically saying “communicate with me my way, or we’ll replace you as secretary”, and talking about how he didn’t want to be president but it was thrust upon him because nobody else would take it. I responded with an ecstatic “YES, PLEASE DO” and explained how I didn’t want to be secretary, have had it thrust upon me twice, and have been doing it for about 10 years total of my 15 years in the club.

I guess I’ll have to wait to see if I’ve called his bluff or whether I’m really going to be free of this horrible task. Maybe I’ll spend some time converting the club web site to Joomla so I can hand off more of that to others in the club.

This morning I went flying. First time since I got back from Oshkosh. I had to take the club’s Dakota out to Batavia for its annual. It reminded me what I loved and everything I hated about flying. It took an hour to scrape the snow and ice off the wings, and then it took most of the way to Batavia to get my toes to stop freezing. I made a couple of rookie mistakes on the departure, including making a wrong turn on the taxiway and actually forgetting to push the push-to-talk at one point. But by the time I got to Batavia things were going pretty good, and I made three perfect landings. I definitely need to squeeze in some time to do this more often.

This afternoon I went paddling. It was even colder than last week, but it wasn’t windy at all and it wasn’t snowing and blowing like last week. I wore an anorak over the wet suit and polytherm I wore last week, and it was too much – I actually ended up taking off my toque for much of the time. As well as Dan and Steven, we also had Doug along. He hasn’t been out for a while, and his boat still has his race number for the Long Lake race on it. Steven was trying a different boat, the KayakPro Marlin that I kept asking Ken to try all year but the rudder wasn’t working. And sure enough, half way through it the rudder broke again. Doug and I paddled on ahead while Dan and Steven worked on the boat, and next time we saw them Dan was in the KayakPro Marlin and Steven was in the Epic 18X that he’d been trying last week.

There was a ice on parts of the canal – for much of it there was ice up against one bank or the other coming out a few feet. It was thin enough that if you got into it you could paddle through it and it would break. But far more fun was to paddle along beside it, because as your wake flexed the ice sheet it made a sound very much like electrical wires twanging in the breeze. It was erie and cool.

Dan was in top form today, taking time to call out encouragement and advice to everybody about their strokes. He was really riding Stephen’s ass too – it seemed almost mean, but Stephen gives as good as he gets and still has that desire to start paddling like crazy when he should be slowing down and thinking. I was doing an ok job of hanging on to Doug when he was paddling at a moderate pace, which I thought was a sign how far I’d progressed. I still need to work on not letting my technique fall apart when I’m tired or when I’m thinking of other things.

Oh, and just to top a perfect day, I was able to get out of my kayak at Dan’s dock without help for the first time. Now if only I could get the spray skirt on without help.

It never fails that when on “FAA Data Reload Day” (which occurs every 56 days on the ICAO cycle), I manage to screw something up and end up staying up late. It doesn’t matter how early I start.

Today’s screw up was after loading the data, I realized that I’d done something wrong, and needed to restore the database to the state it was before I started the load. For reasons too complicated to go into here, I load the data on my home Linux box, and then scp it up to my colo box where the web site lives. The database that lives on my home box doesn’t have all the same tables as the one on my colo box, just the tables that are important to data loading.

So, I thought, the easiest way to get back to the data as it was before the data load is to upload the script I use to export the appropriate tables on the home box to the colo box, run it there, copy the file back to the home box and load it. Except after I loaded it, I noticed a distinct lack of data on my home box. As a matter of fact, it appears that the load went way too fast, like it had no data at all. A quick look at the export file confirmed that there wasn’t any data in it, just some table deletion and creation stuff. Oh oh.

That’s when I realized that one of the consequences of having different versions of PostgreSQL on the two boxes was that “pg_dump … -t waypoint -t comm_freqs -t runway…” works on my home box, but not on the colo. Not thinking too straight, I then used a ‘for table in …” command to run pg_dump on each table individually. When I copied them home, I discovered that this messed up the foreign keys rather badly. So I tried to manually stitch all the files together. That wasn’t working very well, because I had things in the wrong order and the foreign key stuff still wasn’t right.

That’s when it suddenly hit me. Duh. The whole reason I have an external drive on my machine is so that I can do hourly rsync backups. I have a copy of the postgis.dump file that I copied over 56 days ago. As a matter of fact, I have dozens of copies of it. The only reason I was avoiding it was because I had done a few small manual modifications to the database since then. But those were still in the history buffer of psql, and so they were easy to reproduce. I restored the backup, made the changes at around 10:45, ran the updates again, and now here it is at 11:30 and everything is finally done.

I just hope this doesn’t happen again in 56 days, although I’m sure it will.

I renewed my aviation medical today, and while it was relatively painless, I failed the vision test without my reading glasses, and so now I have a restriction. Which is stupid, because I have no problem reading things at the distance of my charts or GPS, it’s only really close up and in dim light that I need my glasses. Also I still appear to have some twitchiness in my right eye, the one that was having problems, due to lack of sleep and I have no doubt that I’d pass the test on a normal day.

Oh well. It sucks getting old.

I haven’t flown since I got back from Oshkosh. I haven’t even replaced my log book, which was stolen a few days before I left for Oshkosh. My medical expired on August, and I haven’t bothered to renew it. I’m beginning to wonder if flying, the activity that I longed to do since I was 12, and which I used to revolve my life around, just isn’t important to me any more. If that’s the case, I kind of wish I’d discovered that before I spent $2000+ on replacing stuff that was stolen before Oshkosh.

Since I’m moving from my high paying job to a lower paying one, maybe it’s time to go “inactive” in the flying club.

I’m testing a new update script for my navaid.com waypoint database. The old update scripts were written for when I was running on MySQL, and I’ve switched to PostGIS to support the new iPhone version of the CoPilot flight planning program. One of the salient features of the new iPhone version is that it attempts to be smart about downloading waypoints as you need them. One of the ways it does that is by asking my server for all the points in a particular area that have changed since a given date. The app keeps track of all the “areas” it has seen, and when the last time it was updated, and asks for an update of those areas at certain intervals. But that means I have to keep track of when a point was last updated. It also means that I need to keep track of what “area” a point is in. For the areas, I use a pseudo-quadtree where I allow only 500 points in an “area”, and when it gets more than that I split the cell into four sub-cells and mark the original cell as “superseded”. The new sub-cells have a “supersedes” value, so if the app asks for an area X, and area X has been split, I can say “X has been superseded, and here are the area ids A, B, C, and D that supersede it.”

But all this means that my new update scripts have to get the new data for a waypoint, figure out which old waypoint it was equivalent to (even if the waypoint has been resurveyed and is at a slightly different location and/or it has changed id), and only save the point anew if something significant has changed. Oh, and if the new data is missing information that the old data has, try to be smart about keeping the old data – for instance, George Plews’ Airports In Canada web site has data for airports in Canada that I can’t get any other way, but it’s also got data for airports that either were in the DAFIF data or are in the FAA data, and those two data sources often have much more information about runways and communications frequencies that Plews doesn’t have. So I want his latest data, but I don’t want to lose the other stuff that he doesn’t.

One of the things I do to match up the old with the new data is look with a bit of geographic “slop” – in the case where the ID matches I look within 0.05 degrees latitude and 0.05 degrees longitude (which believe me, in Alaska is way too big an area), and if the IDs don’t match, I look within 0.025 degrees longitude and 0.025 degrees longitude. These numbers were chosen extremely arbitrarily, and still causes a bit of a problem with a couple of airports that are near the US/Canada border because when I’m loading the FAA data it changes some Canadian airport to the nearby US airport, and then when I load the Plews data it changes it back.

Testing out my load scripts, I discovered two things:

1. Sometimes the resurveyed point has moved enough that it’s in a different “area”. And that’s going to confuse the hell out of the algorithm that the app uses for getting updates, because it will ask for updates for the old area, and not get anything for that point. That’s going to require some thought to fix.
2. In the next FAA data load, they’ve actually moved a couple of airports by 1.0 degrees of latitude or longitude. And judging by what I’m seeing on the Our Airports site maps, it appear the new values are correct, so the old ones must have been a data entry error. In this case, my “match the old” algorithm didn’t find anything to match within its radius of action, so it made a new point and marked the old one as deleted. The app should deal with that nicely.

Hmmm. Need to think how to handle this…

I’m using this post to track the problems and user interface deficiencies that I’m having with the AvMap EKP-IV.

• The damn CF card is busted, and they they’re currently giving me a run-around instead of sending me a new one! was busted, and the replacement came with a return envelope that wasn’t postage paid.
• There should be a single keystroke to get to the currently active flight plan, instead of having to hit “Menu”, “Menu”, “Flight Plans”.
• You should be able to name flight plans.
• Calling the button for the nearest airport “Page” is stupid.
• Hitting the “nearest” button twice should take you to the nearest airport button instead of forcing you to hit “Page”, “Menu”, “Airport”. If you need the nearest airport, you generally need it FAST.
• Why do I keep end up in the cursor mode just about every time I go to the map page, even if I haven’t touched the joystick? It should only be in a cursor mode if I move the cursor with the joystick.
• The joystick is way too sensitive.
• There should be a half-arc on the display with DTK and TRK on it like the Garmin 296 and 530W have. The only thing close is to use up a lot of screen real-estate for a HSI display.
• The way the vertical navigation works is stupid – as far as I can tell, you have to put in the top altitude, the bottom altitude and the glide slope every time you use it. In the Garmins, you just say “I want to be at 1000 AGL when I get 3 nm from the airport, and I want to descend at 500 fpm”, and it calculates where to start your descent based on your current altitude and the altitude of the airport.
• The manual wasn’t included in the box, even though the Quick Start booklet said it would be.
• The manual, which I downloaded from the web site, sucked rocks.
• The power switch evidently turns itself on if you just breathe on it. I’ve discovered the batteries dead numerous times, and it’s just sitting on my flight bag.

I’ll probably think of others.

To answer Gordon’s question in the comments below, what I like about the EKP-IV:

• It has a really great screen. It’s big, it’s bright, and it’s very clear
• Even better, it’s in “portrait” mode. My original GPS, a Garmin 195, was in portrait mode, and I never understood why they went to landscape mode for later models. I don’t know about everybody else, but I want to see where I am and where I’m going, not where I am and 30 miles to each side. And the AnywhereMap Travel Companion and the new Bendix King AV8OR are landscape mode too. I don’t get it.
• It’s about the same price as a 296, much cheaper than a 396, 496 or even a 495. I don’t need XM WX yet, but if I do, I like the idea that it will someday be an optional extra on this unit, rather than having to make the decision at purchase time like the Garmins.
• It was strongly recommended by a friend who had one, sold it to buy a 496 for the weather, but then wished he’d kept the EKP-IV.
• It doesn’t have a road mode. That way I won’t be tempted to leave it on the dashboard of my car. Let the next car thief steal a Nuvi or other car type GPS and leave my aviation GPS alone!
• I looked longingly at the AnywhereMap new iPaq Travel Companion, and while it had some amazing features, it was incredibly slow. This one looked like it had some of the features, without the horrible slowness.