Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
Update: Did I sound a little annoyed with AvMap when I posted this? Well, I suppose I was. But I think I’ve finally managed to convince the support person that I’ve done everything I can, so they’re finally going to send me a new CF card. So I’m a lot less annoyed. I still wish there was a way to get them to listen to my ideas about the user interface, though. It doesn’t seem right to open a support ticket for that, but there isn’t anything else I can see on their web page for other feedback.
I made three major purchases at Oshkosh.
It’s been a mixed bag.
The iCom worked out of the box, I was able to use it on the trip home, and now I’ve had a chance to go through the manual it looks like it will do everything I need and then some (I didn’t know about the automatic marine weather mode, for instance). It’s slightly annoying that the free headset adaptor is a mail-in thing, and I have to make copies of the sales receipt and registration card.
The Clarity Aloft didn’t work, and I didn’t discover that until I fired up the engine for the flight home. I wrote to them as soon as I got home and they were very apologetic. They shipped a replacement immediately, and it arrived today. I took it out to the airport to make sure it worked fine, and it did. They didn’t send a pre-paid return shipping slip, so I’m going to have to pay to return the broken one and get reimbursed. I’m going to keep the extra eartips from the first one as a compensation for my troubles.
The EKP IV did work, after a fashion. There are a few items of the user interface that absolutely drive me bonkers, and a few that are minor annoyances. After I got home, I thought I’d grab the latest firmware to see if some of the worst bugs have been fixed. That involves putting the CF card in a card reader on my computer and copying some files over. Seems simple enough. The manual suggests very strongly that you keep a copy of the files on your computer, so I did. But after updating the CF card and putting it back into the unit, though, the unit says “DEVICE not PRESENT”. (Yes, that’s the capitalization.) I tried restoring the backup files, but it didn’t help. I tried copying the files to a different CF card, and the unit boots with it, but can’t access the aviation database - that’s not entirely unexpected, because the aviation database is somehow keyed to the CF card. The problem is that I just can’t seem to convince the AvMap people that the CF card is toast and I need a new one. I’ve exchanged a number of emails with somebody in Italy where I set out my very strong evidence that it’s not what I’m doing, or the version of the firmware I’m using, and they send back instructions that basically assume that I’m doing something wrong or using the wrong version of the firmware. If they don’t ship me a new CF card in the next 24 hours, I’m going to go to my credit card company and get them to cancel payment on this. And then I’m going to buy a reconditioned Garmin 296 or a 496.
I went to register my AvMap EKP-IV GPS. While doing so, I noticed that the firmware I have is a couple of version numbers older than the current downloadable one. Upgrading is supposed to be a simple matter of popping out the CF card, putting it into the computer, and copying over the two files you download, and then putting the CF card back in the GPS. Well, I did that, but then the GPS started saying “Device not found”. So I copied back the original files, which I’d copied onto my laptop as suggested in the documentation. And I got the same damn message. So now I’m basically boned.
The instructions were all about “Hilight the two files and drag them”, but I used “cp -R”. I wonder if there is a permissions problem? I knew I should have made a tar file instead of just a copy.
I’d gotten an STMP (or whatever it’s called) reservation for an IFR departure at 1715Z. But by 1400Z, there just wasn’t that much left to do around the campsite, and I didn’t want to buy another day’s ticket. So I went down to the gate house, got my camping refund (they make you pay for the whole week in advance, then give you a refund when you leave), got a weather briefing, and took a shower, then got ready to depart VFR to see if I could pick up flight following from Muskegon Approach.
Continue reading ‘Back from Oshkosh’ »
This morning I was sitting there enjoying my breakfast and the early morning quiet when a woman who was parked a few planes down (so she arrived the same time as me) came over to chew me out for nearly hitting her when I turned final on Saturday. I told her that while I don’t remember it exactly, I’m pretty sure my base had been called by the tower, so I really don’t know how that could have happened. Although in retrospect, I could have been focusing too hard on the Mooney I was told to follow, and not enough on looking around.
Now I’m all nervous about just how bad a job I did arriving here, and I’m even more sure that I shouldn’t do the VFR arrival without a second pair of eyes on board.
BTW: Wifi sucks here. It sometimes works at the shower stalls, but it cuts in and out when it does, and the wifi here at the bus shelter is more reliable but there isn’t any power here.
(This was originally part of a journal that I’m keeping on my computer, so it might repeat stuff that I’ve already put on the blog.)
Continue reading ‘Oshkosh First Day’ »
Yesterday I found some power but no wifi. Today I found wifi but no power. So I was able to finally get the log file that my boss emailed me yesterday. I had been trying to find a way to read it on my cell phone, but for some stupid reason every “text reader” I managed to find for the Palm either required you to convert the text file to something else on your PC, or the program itself was only available as a zip file, and I have no way of unzipping files on the Palm. Why can’t they just make the bare .PRC file available?
Once I got the log file, it only took me a minute to find the fix, so I’ve emailed me off. Yesterday I started writing a long narrative of my Oshkosh so far, and I was going to put it all up when I got home, but now I have wifi I guess I could cut and paste that into blog posts.
I made it to Oshkosh. And I flew the Ripon-Fisk VFR arrival. Man, I have never been so close to so many aircraft in the air before in my life. As I was coming up to Ripon, a Bonanza passed about 20 feet off my left wing and crossed about 20 feet in front of me. I don’t know if he saw me or not. Then since we were over Ripon already, I just turned up the tracks, but I think I cut off a Mooney who was also coming up the tracks. I was told to follow another Mooney up to Runway 27.
The instructions say to turn up the road just north of the field as a downwind leg, but the Mooney went about a mile wider than that, and an RV snuck in between us. I’m not sure where he came from, but I think he might have gone around from his previous approach. They also extended the downwind way out over the lake. Tower told me to turn to base immediately, and that put me way too close to the Mooney (I lost sight of the RV again), and then he told the Mooney to go around, and I thought he said for me to go around, but then he expressed surprise when I did, so I guess that was my other mistake.
But we got slotted into the downwind again and landed safely, although I don’t think he ever cleared me to land.
It was a very strange experience, and I’m really glad I did it. But next time I’m going to make sure I get an IFR reservation.
The guy who wanted a ride from Muskegon to Oshkosh has changed his mind. Probably. He’s still looking for a ride home on Tuesday, possibly by bus, but unless he calls me sometime tonight or tomorrow while I’m on-route to Muskegon, I’m going to be alone.
Time to study that NOTAM one more time, I guess.
I worked my ass off today trying to get these two bugs fixed before I left. I ended up coming out 12 hours after I got to work. I tried to put my key in the lock, and somebody had punched it out. A quick glance inside my car confirmed my worst fears: they’ve cleaned it out. Well, mostly. I suppose I should be thankful that they didn’t steal my PFD and kayak paddle. But the following items are gone:
There’s probably a bunch more things that I haven’t remembered yet. I haven’t even looked at my trunk yet to see if they got into that.
On the plus side, I finished a log book not too long ago, and I keep a duplicate entry in a program on my PDA, so other than my most recent BFR and IPC endorsements, I haven’t lost much there. It doesn’t look like anything irreplaceable. And I will be going to Oshkosh, which is probably a pretty darn good place to go with a shopping list and the knowledge that an insurance claim will pay for some of it. I just need to make sure I have a headset for the trip out.
I feel bad about the leather flight bag - Vicki was so upset when it didn’t come for Christmas. I think it came about 6 months later. Evidently Sportys waits until they get an order, and then they inseminate a cow, and wait for the calf to be big enough.
Update
Just remembered a few more items:
Update 2:
I just remembered something else that was in my car: my Duluth Trading messenger bag. I don’t remember everything that was in it, but I’m pretty sure my Canadian passport was. Good thing it’s expired. My British passport might have been in there as well, but it expired years and years ago.
I found a guy who wants a ride from Muskegon to Oshkosh, so at least I’m going to have somebody to help me with the Fisk approach.
I waited too long to request an IFR reservation for Sunday for Oshkosh (I should have been on the STMP site yesterday afternoon) and now there aren’t any arrival slots in any timeframe I could reasonably make. I wonder if I could file IFR to the FAH VOR and proceed VFR from there?
I was hoping to not have to do the Fisk arrival without a copilot, but it looks like that’s going to happen.
After the race where my time sucked because of the broken skeg, and the race where my time sucked because I was in a strange boat, today I didn’t have any excuses - I was back in my own boat. And who needs excuses when you improve your previous best time by 48 seconds!
The rain ended minutes before the race - the thunderstorm had been so intense that they’d announced at work that people should not wade through puddles because the intense rainfall had blown the tops of manholes and you might fall in one.
The creek was running pretty fast, and the bay was calm and flat. For me, that was perfect. I really enjoyed the strategy of trying to read the river and find the quieter parts on the way upstream and the faster bits for the way downstream. I was a little scared of breaking my skeg so I pulled it up long before I got to the channel off the bay. And then I paddled inside the “scum line” - a line of duckweed that showed you where there was a little back-eddy for some of the upstream, then it was cutting inside corners and trying to stay as close to the inner bank as I could and still make a good paddle stroke. After the turn, I paddled downstream in the fastest part of the stream, usually the outside of corners.
What a great evening. Worth missing watching the best stage of the Tour de France for, which is high praise indeed.
I signed up for the EAA Rideshare to try to get somebody to ride along on my trip to Oshkosh. I got three people responding, and the two who gave their “preferred response” as phone, neither of them have returned my calls. The third was all set to come, until I told him that I was going to return on Thursday.
Only one week to Oshkosh, and I’ve barely started getting ready. I think I need to write what I need so I can strike them out as they’re done.
You’ll note that I only plan to prepare breakfasts. OshawaPilot will verify that after a day of walking around Oshkosh I’m so wiped out that I’m useless for doing just about anything around the camp, so I’m planning to eat brats on the show site.
I’m also still having camera trouble - I bought a Minolta Maxuum 7D DSLR on eBay, but it was broken so I had to send it back, and I haven’t heard anything from them since.
I upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.6. It was extremely painless - I didn’t even bother to deactivate my plugins. So far, it looks pretty much the same. I do like the new plugins page, though. One of these days I’d like to see if I can get the Gallery plugin working - I had it working for a while, but it broke after a couple of upgrades of both Gallery and Wordpress.
