Barney Townsend

Thanks for the advice Steve, The ArduPilot looks interesting- it's great what people are doing with arduino nowadays! It would probably be a good solution for accurate flying, and at a couple of hundred dollars (or so the first sites I've just dug in seem to say) may well be within budget - although of course that's after paying for the aircraft and training as well! As far as GPS, we normally carry AMOD loggers (http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/amodphotologger.php) which can be set to a 1 second breacrumb. Very small and light too. Regarding the rules... of course we would check thoroughly and would certainly not do anything that directly contravenes them. "The spirit of" however is a very grey area! One might argue that those pilots who are innovative enough to explore every possible avenue of information deserve to reap the rewards! Regards Barney

Hi All This is a request for advice on behalf of the British Paramotor Team (www.britishteam.info). We are competing for GB in the World Paramotor Championships this August, in Marugan, near Segovia in Spain. Having won Silver in the last World Championship, we are in with a fighting chance of bringing back Gold for GB this year. A lot of the competition is based on navigation over a large area, often with pre-declared leg speeds, so accurate prior knowledge of the wind direction and speeds at various heights is a huge advantage. As I'm sure you all know, very often the met is not to be entirely trusted on a local level! We would normally get our weather data by sending up a pilot with a GPS to fly circuits at various heights. The trace on the GPS can then give us a very accurate idea of what we're up against. This however will be forbidden in competition. We had the idea that we could equally well strap the GPS onto a model aircraft and send that up instead. It does of course need someone trained to fly it well in accurate circuits at consistent height. Do you think that this would be a viable and accurate way of gauging wind speeds? Are there are any British Ex-Pat model flyers who live in that area, and would be happy to play a role in supporting a British Team competing abroad? Please do get in touch! I would guess that my second question above might be too much to hope for! In which case my next one would be that if we were to look into purchasing a model and doing some training ourselves, which types of craft would you recommend for the job? I would guess we'd need something quite slow-flying, and very stable. Also, how would we go about training on them? Thanks in advance for any help you can give me, Barney Townsend