Experiences
USA Proving Grounds Condor Contest Tour
Join members of the Proving Grounds team on Sunday nights (8:30EST) for a friendly tour through various Proving Grounds installations across America organized through a Condor Club soaring competition.
The Condor soaring simulator is an incredible tool to help introduce XC soaring and task flying to pilots interested in flying tasks in real gliders. It’s an effective way to gain comfort with a flight computer – setup, task definition, and use in flight.
With the opportunity to chat with other pilots sharing the same task, some of the benefits otherwise only available through dual flying mentoring flights can be shared.
The bottom line is, using Condor as a task flying / XC soaring training tool can be powerful to help novice time building glider pilots become soaring pilots. Since this is also the goal of the Proving Grounds, we will be organizing flights to actively support pilots looking to become more adept at task flying through a Condor competition as we tour across America flying tasks at sites with Proving Grounds installations and Condor Scenery.
The critical items:
– Please register for the competition on Condor Club – Current Competition
– Task information will include a link to a Discord channel to share audio, the link will be provided to registered pilots
– Join the Discord channel up 15 or so minutes before the task start time for support with Condor, XCSoar, or Proving Grounds
– At the time of the task find the ‘Proving Grounds’ server from the Condor 2 server list
The tasks for the competition will always be the largest Proving Grounds task at a given soaring site, and you can find the task sheet for each club at soaringtasks.com, by searching for the club we’ll be flying at, or locating the blog post under “Resources”.
Useful Resources:
– How to get started with Condor
– How to set up your XCSoar device with Proving Grounds in America
– Using XCSoar with Condor (I find that the IP address of my device changes, so if you can’t connect on a successive attempt confirm that the IP is the same, or update the command in 4) d)
After the flight:
When you’ve completed the flight, there are a few things to do to see how well you did:
1) Upon exiting the flight you’ll enter Condor’s ‘Debriefing’ area with the opportunity to “Analyze Flight” – click that
2) If you click “Save” toward the bottom left of the ‘Flight Analysis’ panel, you’ll be able to save your .ftr file, which you should do, then upload it to the competition on Condor Club (see the Current Competition link above)
3) If you click “IGC export” toward the left of the ‘Flight Analysis’ panel, you’ll be able to save your .igc file, which you should do. Attach the .igc file to an email and submit it for scoring to the Proving Grounds bot for the site we were flying at
4) You might also consider uploading the .igc file to skylinescondor.com for analysis and sharing
We hope you’ll join us, and that participating in this friendly competition will be informative on task flying, XCSoar configuration, using the Proving Grounds, competition strategy and keeping you excited for the sport of soaring!
If there isn’t a landscape for the area where you fly, request some local terrain – ensure it encompasses the Proving Grounds from the folks at Soaringtools.org.
All references to “Condor” refer to the most recent version of the software.
