Competition Pilots & Scorekeepers

GPS Altitude in warm weather

The CIVL decided to use the barometric altitude now for judgement of airspace violations. See http://www.chabre2009.com -> Local Regs/Docs -> Altitude addendum.
On the other hand the PWCA decided, that for the next event in Buzet, Croatia there will be altitude restrictions defined by the GPS altitude. Bräuniger offers special competition firmware versions for the Compeo/Compeo+ and Competino/Competino+ with a new userfield "Alt GPS". The userfield is not available in Flychart and we don't change the manual for that.
Link to the firmware

For Competition Pilots and Scorekeepers

CTR Segment issue

An incident at the Pre Worlds in Mount Cucco, Italy shows that the definition of segments in the OpenAir format is unclear. It is absolutely necessary that the scorekeepers as well as the software and hardware developers agree on the same interpretation of segment definitions in the OpenAir format of airspaces.
The problem arises because a definition of a segment with center point, point 1 and point 2 is overdefined. In case of CTR 3 at the preworlds, the two distances differ by 400 to 430 m depending on the calculation method.

The other problem seems to be, that different software seems to interprete the direction in the segment definition in a different way. This has to be clarified.

The Compeo+ seems to handle the end points in a different way depending on the direction definition. But Bräuniger will only change the calculation method, if the main developers of software for flight calculations agree on the same calculation methods.

For pilots, Bräuniger proposes to insist on CTR definitions for competitions which are based only on lines. Here, all the calculations programs seem to behave the same way.

Turnpoint Discrepancies in Competition Scoring

The various scoring programs used in hang gliding/paragliding competition calculate distances between two points on the Earth’s surface using two different earth models: the FAI sphere or the WGS84 ellipsoid. Bräuniger instruments calculate distances using the FAI sphere, whereas some scoring programs like Compe GPS Competition use the WGS84 ellipsoid. Distances calculated between two points can disagree between these two models. Consequently, scoring programs that do not use the FAI sphere model may not exactly agree with the flight recorded by the instrument. This is of particular importance when determining if a pilot has crossed a start or turnpoint cylinder. For this reason the PWC recommends a tolerance of 0.5 % on distance measurements to allow for the different earth models and calculation and rounding error.

Recommendation

If this situation arises in a competition, where the pilot is certain that he had heard the “turnpoint reached” alert as he crossed the cylinder, and the scorekeeper does not grant this waypoint because the scoring program shows the pilot short of the cylinder by only a few meters, we recommend the pilot file a protest and that the distance is recalculated with this calculator http://williams.best.vwh.net/gccalc.htm.

For Scorekeepers

This website contains special information for scorekeepers and competition organizer.

Important Information to the Bräuniger Compeo+

The new Bräuniger Compeo+ is not a true USB device. It simply has a USB to serial converter built directly into the instrument. From a software point of view it is still a serial device with the same protocol as the Compeo and therefore almost every flight analysis program can handle the Compeo+. All you need to do is to install the converters's driver on your computer. Drivers for your operating system (Windows, Mac or Linux) can be downloaded from here: USB-Driver

Bräuniger 3D GNSS suited for competitions: