Hi everyone,
I have few more complicated questions:
1 - I believe many (most?) of us use XCsoar
mostly for 'casual' XC or OLC, and less for contest/record/badges, which means
in most flights no task is set. It is not clear to me what is the recomended
strategy to configure
XCSoar to this most common type of flying. The most important
information for the casual XC pilot is distance, direction and arrival
altitude at various landout places along the course, using conservative
glide angle (typically half to 2/3 of published polar). The best way to
accomplish this I believe is using the safety MC. Although the manual
recommends to set it slightly above zero, I find that I need to select
safety MC=4 to degrade my polar by 1/3. This seem to work fine for the arrival
labels, which
are taking wind, polar, safety MC, safety altitude and reach into account.
However, it is often very helpful to closely monitor arrival altitude
(even when negative) and distance to selected airport (typically the
home airport). I found doing 'goto' and monitoring the Next infobox to
be the best method. However to my surprise the arrival altitude in the
Next InfoBox ignores safety MC and uses actual MC instead. This is a
problem, since if I fly at low MC, it will show an overly optimistic
arrival altitude, and if I fly at much higher MC, it will show overly
pasimistic number. I know I can set it manualy to the same value as my
safety MC, but then, I don't want to use this MC setting to determine my speed
to fly, and if I change the MC to a lower setting in my 302 it will increase my
arrival altitude in the infobox. So either my strategy is wrong or we need an
option to display in an Infobox the arrival altitude of the next turnpoint
taking MC safety into account instead of actual MC, and possibly even taking
reach into account.
2 - I noticed that the MC setting always defaults to the safety MC, in manual
or auto mode. Is this by design? It sure looks wrong, especially when the
safety MC is set high to degrade the polar by 1/3. It will stay high until
either the pilot changes it or it changes automatically after the first
thermal. But until then, it will dictate a very high speed to fly right of tow,
which is obviously not a good idea. Am I missing something?
My conclusion for the 2 issues above is that I should either use MC for speed
to fly and ignore the arrival altitude InfoBox, or set the MC to safety MC to
use the Arrival altitude Infobox and not use the MC for STF, but I am not sure
this is possible if the 302 is connected to XCSoar.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
Ramy
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