nice explanation - when I first saw the tagline to the video, I initially was expecting to see a video about how you look out for hawk birds thermalling and how you thermal with them - it's too early in the morning!
Hi Tim, thanks for the video. My months trial of Hawk will end today and I will definitely be buying the license. I still don’t understand the magic behind it but I’m definitely hooked. With my modest experience I find it much easier to center a thermal for I can see exactly where the strongest lift was in my last turn. Almost feels like it is cheating, but hey, I’ll take all the help I can get. The instantaneous wind also gives me a better picture in my minds eye, of what is likely to be the best side of a line of convergence especially in the absence of your famous ‘daggy’ bits. I already had the Artificial Horizon software with my setup so I feel that LXNav should have two tiers of pricing for Hawk since I am effectively paying for my A/H twice.
The principle used in HAWK is interesting in that I used to use it back in the day when navigating ships around the world with a sextant - my first job. To figure out your position would would do a sight in the morning which, after a lot of calculations using spherical trig - haversines and the like, and would give you a line (actually an arc) on which you were... somewhere. At exactly midday, i.e. the highest position of the sun, another sight would reveal your latitude. The morning sight was then transferred up to your midday position as you knew the velocity of the ship - the two lines crossed and revealed your lat and long.
@@Rodhern It's not perfect but good enough. Going transatlantic you follow the shortest distance which, on a globe, is a great circle which looks like a curve on the standard Mercator projection chart so you have to change the course about once a day for five days. The compasses we used were mercury ballistic gyroscopes and were pretty good, they were checked once a day taking a bearing of a star and were usually within a degree or two. We measured the distance we covered using a log: not the paper one on the bridge but a metal impeller on a couple of 100 meters of rope dragged behind the ship. The number of rotations were measured and converted into distance - you wouldn't think it but they were pretty accurate. Ocean currents are not really a factor. So don't change course between 8:00amd and 13:00 and moving the position line is good enough. Clouds were a problem though! I did one transatlantic crossing to New York (I think, it was a long time ago) with clouds all the way. We used dead reckoning - educated guess work, and arrived right on the button.
I've loved the Hawk so far. Between removing the TE probe to simplify life, and being able to fly lift lines like a Boss, I am in love. I've still got some tweaking to do. But I really really like this thing. The HAWK does take a bit to get used to when thermaling. Because it's instantaneously reporting the lift - the thermal entry and centering seems to be something to adjust to due to not having the typical lag we are accustomed to. It's fine though and I think I've just about got it.
@@PureGlide I think I need to turn down the SIGWIND a tad, though. Last flight I had minimal lift, was increasing in altitude, had the nose down, and it didn't report for a bit. Then it started sounding. It was very very marginal lift. So I might change the SIGWIND down by one setting point so it's a pinch more twitchy. I only gained 20' but it didn't show anything, and I definitely wasn't doing the lifting. I like that it hides the gusts, but I also want to see every ounce of lift I can find, if needed haha! Did you do a test flight without the TE yet? I removed the red needle entirely. Eh. Who needs it. Also set the SC audio to SC instead of relative. Meh. The needle shows to slow down by full scale then fine, it's lift. 😂
Yeah by the end of the first flight with it I had switched over to hawk completely. And then had 2 more flights. I haven't tweaked any settings yet....
@@TheSoaringChannel Reducing the sigwind makes the HAWK horizontal and vertical winds less "twitchy" not more so. (Bigger = Bouncier, Smaller = Smoother is my aide memoir). I am totally converted to the HAWK for the cruise and the climb vario - especially for centring - and no longer use the red TEK needle. The LXNAV currently recommended sigwind of 0.11 seems right to me. The instant winds are a bonus.
Still really happy with my Air Glide S which has the same capabilities, but it's a bunch of work to position the compass sensor where magnetic fields from currents and speakers won't throw it off.
hey PG wondering where you and the vids dissappeared to, nice to see you back, like the product reviews. can you explain briefly how a total energy probe works - much appreciated. cheers.
Hey thanks mate, just been busy with work and gliding comps :) Total energy probes will have to be a whole video in itself! I tried not to get too bogged down in the details here...
Based on what I've seen in a few videos, the HAWK works about the same at TE varios in smooth air. I would like to see if it HAWK helps with convergence lift, especially under blue skies with no clouds marking the lift and whether it helps climb in rotor and trashy slope, ridge and thermal lift. My S7 vario is not helpful in trashy air but for the averager function.
Yeah I’ll post some video of it working in convergences. Haven’t had any rough rotor conditions, but from what I’ve seen it’ll tell you what’s actually happening, which you might not want to know :)
I gotta' ask. Since many tablets have stand alone gps, are there any/many apps for vario etc? on those LOVELY BIG SCREENS. Extra handy as your eyes get older. There's a reason modern fighter and civilian aircraft cockpits look like a game arcade from the 80's and 90's. Image a glider cockpit that is just one or two... or three nice sized tablets, do need to look, you can see it all at a glance, not a squint, lol. Also, tablets are mass market devices and hence much cheaper overall, heck most people will already have them and you can't get handier than that.
Hi yeah if you've got the money, you can do giant big screens in your glider right now! The LX9070 is a 7" display you can mount in your panel. You could, if money were no object and they can fit, put 2 of them on your panel! And put essentially all the instruments on them. The reason we can't just use iPads or tablets is because they don't have the inputs such as airspeed and static pressure ports. All GPS will tell you is your ground speed. Now there are devices and boxes that can send that data to your tablet via bluetooth, but then you're relying on battery power and bluetooth to fly, which is not reliable enough. So generally people use screens built into the aircraft. Cheers!
Hi Tim, long time no see! I thought you caught a really BIG thermal and went into geostationary orbit with all the satellites?! The HAWK system looks very promising; I’m looking forward to part 2 when you will show us what it can do…
So if all the Hawks were networked and shared the sensor information with other gliders it would be like the F35 and have an amazingly accurate picture of the air mass
If you watch the webinar linked in the description and stop the video at 22:04 you will see that the good professor is overflying (on the left) a "plage naturiste" or, in english, a nudist beach. I miss nothing!
Finished watching the webinar.... Not 100% convinced. 1/ First of all, how useful is it to know the current wind? In the video linked above the Prof that provided the brains stressed that Hawk was a decision making tool but glider decisions are based on what will be not what was. Knowing how the air is behaving is most important in mountains but, given the irregular nature of mountains the local wind where you are now doesn’t tell you what is happening just around the corner. In fact it might be misleading. It is better to know the prevailing wind, the Environment Lapse Rate and have a good model of how the valley should work in your head given those two inputs. What might be useful is using Hawk in what I would call ‘training mode’, i.e. guess what’s going to happen in the next gully, test those assumptions with Hawk, and adjust your model accordingly: a ‘model, predict, verify, correct’' cycle. 2/ Getting rid of the TE probe is definitely a good thing. An electronic replacement may still suffer from battery outages but the TE is no more reliable and its installation and maintenance costs money. 3/ Having an artificial horizon on the panel is a very good thing 4/ Edit -I suspect that the professor got solution myopia using a clever solution to the problem. Why not use GPS? GPS is pretty good at measuring horizontal position but not that good at altitude so prefer static pressure to measure altitude. Neither horizontal position nor altitude need to be absolutely correct, we are interested in the deltas. So given GPS and static air we can calculate the true glider vector and using the same principles as Hawk we can do as least as well- I think they could then use accelerometers to figure out where glider is really pointing and improve Hawk. The hardware to do this costs a few dollars, the software is expensive so the more we can rely on hardware the better-
Re #1: If only the wind were that simple. I can see a few use cases for it. Stay tuned for video 2 where I talk about how to actually use that information while flying. That's what I found tricky with the hawk, there's a bit of information about HOW it works, very little about WHY and how to use it. Re #4: I'm pretty sure GPS is used in HAWK, so we know the ground speed and direction of the glider. The pitot and statics are sampled much faster of course. This professor is not the only one to use this technique: fly-anemoi.de They did put it in a box with the hardware to do it. Keep in mind development costs are a lot more than the raw material costs, all the time developing, testing, and integrating into the existing LX software, or building your own hardware takes a lot of time! Anyway it's interesting stuff, glad you thought so too, and cheers for taking the time to comment!
@@PureGlide Yes I stand corrected. I skim viewed the webinar and got it wrong - Hawk does use GPS signals so I corrected 4/ above. Wind - simple or not: I don't think wind, at a macro level, is complicated. At small scales, e.g. in the lee of a tree, air movement is turbulent and we're into chaos theory which is beyond my noggin. At a macro scale it is the combination of the terrain and the ELR that dictate complexity. Again reaching back to my maritime days, on a uniform terrain like an ocean we can predict exactly what the wind will do, and as the ocean is essentially flat, the ELR doesn't get to play a role. I remain convinced that it is much more useful to know the prevailing wind than it is to have the 'spot' wind in the current location and time. In the flat lands there is only the prevailing wind. In the mountains we need to continually model what's going to happen next as the terrain unfolds before us and Hawk clouds that issue. Nevertheless I remain open to persuasion and await your next video with bated breath!
nice explanation - when I first saw the tagline to the video, I initially was expecting to see a video about how you look out for hawk birds thermalling and how you thermal with them - it's too early in the morning!
Haha that one is coming...
Hi Tim, thanks for the video. My months trial of Hawk will end today and I will definitely be buying the license. I still don’t understand the magic behind it but I’m definitely hooked. With my modest experience I find it much easier to center a thermal for I can see exactly where the strongest lift was in my last turn. Almost feels like it is cheating, but hey, I’ll take all the help I can get. The instantaneous wind also gives me a better picture in my minds eye, of what is likely to be the best side of a line of convergence especially in the absence of your famous ‘daggy’ bits. I already had the Artificial Horizon software with my setup so I feel that LXNav should have two tiers of pricing for Hawk since I am effectively paying for my A/H twice.
When did you buy the A/H? They did say a discount is possible if you bought it within a certain time
The principle used in HAWK is interesting in that I used to use it back in the day when navigating ships around the world with a sextant - my first job.
To figure out your position would would do a sight in the morning which, after a lot of calculations using spherical trig - haversines and the like, and would give you a line (actually an arc) on which you were... somewhere. At exactly midday, i.e. the highest position of the sun, another sight would reveal your latitude. The morning sight was then transferred up to your midday position as you knew the velocity of the ship - the two lines crossed and revealed your lat and long.
Interesting!
I have to agree with Pure Glide: Interesting, indeed. Quite cool to think that you can 'update' and arc by half a day's ship movement.
@@Rodhern It's not perfect but good enough. Going transatlantic you follow the shortest distance which, on a globe, is a great circle which looks like a curve on the standard Mercator projection chart so you have to change the course about once a day for five days. The compasses we used were mercury ballistic gyroscopes and were pretty good, they were checked once a day taking a bearing of a star and were usually within a degree or two.
We measured the distance we covered using a log: not the paper one on the bridge but a metal impeller on a couple of 100 meters of rope dragged behind the ship. The number of rotations were measured and converted into distance - you wouldn't think it but they were pretty accurate. Ocean currents are not really a factor.
So don't change course between 8:00amd and 13:00 and moving the position line is good enough.
Clouds were a problem though! I did one transatlantic crossing to New York (I think, it was a long time ago) with clouds all the way. We used dead reckoning - educated guess work, and arrived right on the button.
I've loved the Hawk so far. Between removing the TE probe to simplify life, and being able to fly lift lines like a Boss, I am in love. I've still got some tweaking to do. But I really really like this thing.
The HAWK does take a bit to get used to when thermaling. Because it's instantaneously reporting the lift - the thermal entry and centering seems to be something to adjust to due to not having the typical lag we are accustomed to. It's fine though and I think I've just about got it.
Yeah I noticed that too, cheers!
@@PureGlide I think I need to turn down the SIGWIND a tad, though. Last flight I had minimal lift, was increasing in altitude, had the nose down, and it didn't report for a bit. Then it started sounding. It was very very marginal lift. So I might change the SIGWIND down by one setting point so it's a pinch more twitchy. I only gained 20' but it didn't show anything, and I definitely wasn't doing the lifting. I like that it hides the gusts, but I also want to see every ounce of lift I can find, if needed haha!
Did you do a test flight without the TE yet? I removed the red needle entirely. Eh. Who needs it. Also set the SC audio to SC instead of relative. Meh. The needle shows to slow down by full scale then fine, it's lift. 😂
Yeah by the end of the first flight with it I had switched over to hawk completely. And then had 2 more flights. I haven't tweaked any settings yet....
@@TheSoaringChannel Reducing the sigwind makes the HAWK horizontal and vertical winds less "twitchy" not more so. (Bigger = Bouncier, Smaller = Smoother is my aide memoir). I am totally converted to the HAWK for the cruise and the climb vario - especially for centring - and no longer use the red TEK needle. The LXNAV currently recommended sigwind of 0.11 seems right to me. The instant winds are a bonus.
Still really happy with my Air Glide S which has the same capabilities, but it's a bunch of work to position the compass sensor where magnetic fields from currents and speakers won't throw it off.
Interesting cheers!
hey PG wondering where you and the vids dissappeared to, nice to see you back, like the product reviews. can you explain briefly how a total energy probe works - much appreciated. cheers.
Hey thanks mate, just been busy with work and gliding comps :) Total energy probes will have to be a whole video in itself! I tried not to get too bogged down in the details here...
Based on what I've seen in a few videos, the HAWK works about the same at TE varios in smooth air. I would like to see if it HAWK helps with convergence lift, especially under blue skies with no clouds marking the lift and whether it helps climb in rotor and trashy slope, ridge and thermal lift. My S7 vario is not helpful in trashy air but for the averager function.
Yeah I’ll post some video of it working in convergences. Haven’t had any rough rotor conditions, but from what I’ve seen it’ll tell you what’s actually happening, which you might not want to know :)
I gotta' ask. Since many tablets have stand alone gps, are there any/many apps for vario etc? on those LOVELY BIG SCREENS. Extra handy as your eyes get older. There's a reason modern fighter and civilian aircraft cockpits look like a game arcade from the 80's and 90's. Image a glider cockpit that is just one or two... or three nice sized tablets, do need to look, you can see it all at a glance, not a squint, lol. Also, tablets are mass market devices and hence much cheaper overall, heck most people will already have them and you can't get handier than that.
Hi yeah if you've got the money, you can do giant big screens in your glider right now! The LX9070 is a 7" display you can mount in your panel. You could, if money were no object and they can fit, put 2 of them on your panel! And put essentially all the instruments on them.
The reason we can't just use iPads or tablets is because they don't have the inputs such as airspeed and static pressure ports. All GPS will tell you is your ground speed. Now there are devices and boxes that can send that data to your tablet via bluetooth, but then you're relying on battery power and bluetooth to fly, which is not reliable enough. So generally people use screens built into the aircraft. Cheers!
Hi Tim, long time no see! I thought you caught a really BIG thermal and went into geostationary orbit with all the satellites?!
The HAWK system looks very promising; I’m looking forward to part 2 when you will show us what it can do…
haha yeah been busy with gliding contests and work! Lots more videos planned though...
So if all the Hawks were networked and shared the sensor information with other gliders it would be like the F35 and have an amazingly accurate picture of the air mass
True!
Kalman filters are common in a lot of AI situations used to predict future values from past trends.
Interesting!
Kalman filters have been used for over 50 years, in fact I’m amazed no-one has superseded them yet. With love, Ken
I was wondering all video what the EMS around the aircraft is...oh the airmass :)
lol
If you watch the webinar linked in the description and stop the video at 22:04 you will see that the good professor is overflying (on the left) a "plage naturiste" or, in english, a nudist beach. I miss nothing!
Oh really! One could say you have eyes like a.... hawk
Finished watching the webinar....
Not 100% convinced.
1/ First of all, how useful is it to know the current wind? In the video linked above the Prof that provided the brains stressed that Hawk was a decision making tool but glider decisions are based on what will be not what was. Knowing how the air is behaving is most important in mountains but, given the irregular nature of mountains the local wind where you are now doesn’t tell you what is happening just around the corner. In fact it might be misleading. It is better to know the prevailing wind, the Environment Lapse Rate and have a good model of how the valley should work in your head given those two inputs.
What might be useful is using Hawk in what I would call ‘training mode’, i.e. guess what’s going to happen in the next gully, test those assumptions with Hawk, and adjust your model accordingly: a ‘model, predict, verify, correct’' cycle.
2/ Getting rid of the TE probe is definitely a good thing. An electronic replacement may still suffer from battery outages but the TE is no more reliable and its installation and maintenance costs money.
3/ Having an artificial horizon on the panel is a very good thing
4/ Edit -I suspect that the professor got solution myopia using a clever solution to the problem. Why not use GPS? GPS is pretty good at measuring horizontal position but not that good at altitude so prefer static pressure to measure altitude. Neither horizontal position nor altitude need to be absolutely correct, we are interested in the deltas. So given GPS and static air we can calculate the true glider vector and using the same principles as Hawk we can do as least as well- I think they could then use accelerometers to figure out where glider is really pointing and improve Hawk. The hardware to do this costs a few dollars, the software is expensive so the more we can rely on hardware the better-
Re #1: If only the wind were that simple. I can see a few use cases for it. Stay tuned for video 2 where I talk about how to actually use that information while flying. That's what I found tricky with the hawk, there's a bit of information about HOW it works, very little about WHY and how to use it.
Re #4: I'm pretty sure GPS is used in HAWK, so we know the ground speed and direction of the glider. The pitot and statics are sampled much faster of course. This professor is not the only one to use this technique: fly-anemoi.de They did put it in a box with the hardware to do it.
Keep in mind development costs are a lot more than the raw material costs, all the time developing, testing, and integrating into the existing LX software, or building your own hardware takes a lot of time!
Anyway it's interesting stuff, glad you thought so too, and cheers for taking the time to comment!
@@PureGlide Yes I stand corrected. I skim viewed the webinar and got it wrong - Hawk does use GPS signals so I corrected 4/ above.
Wind - simple or not: I don't think wind, at a macro level, is complicated. At small scales, e.g. in the lee of a tree, air movement is turbulent and we're into chaos theory which is beyond my noggin. At a macro scale it is the combination of the terrain and the ELR that dictate complexity. Again reaching back to my maritime days, on a uniform terrain like an ocean we can predict exactly what the wind will do, and as the ocean is essentially flat, the ELR doesn't get to play a role.
I remain convinced that it is much more useful to know the prevailing wind than it is to have the 'spot' wind in the current location and time. In the flat lands there is only the prevailing wind. In the mountains we need to continually model what's going to happen next as the terrain unfolds before us and Hawk clouds that issue.
Nevertheless I remain open to persuasion and await your next video with bated breath!
First!
Maybe last too