Greetings all. I'm a PPL(A)/Night/IMC-R pilot based at Carlisle and Kirkbride in Cumbria, flying, mostly, Warriors and a kit-build Sportcruiser that I completed building earlier this year. Scotland is my main stomping ground though I do occasionally venture south, notably to Compton Abbas. I've arrived here because Rob Hart encouraged me to look at SkyDemon Plan, having for many years successfully used a well known competing product from Holland.



I must say that I like what I see with SkyDemon. On the basis that today's software should be able to be used without having to read the manual, that's what I've done and in the process I've created some routes, uploaded them to my venerable 296 and generally had a good play. It's tempting to make the switch!



One question though...



On the 296 I collect track data and typically there might be data from 20 or so flights, all separately itemised in the GPS flights log. When I download these to MemoryMap, they correctly appear as separate flights. Downloading into SkyDemon, the track data seems to be concatenated into a single "flight" and, of course, the resultant map display is essentially useless.



Is this a known bug and/or is there a solution in prospect? I can supply some.GDB files if it will help.



Finally... this software does seem to be a bit familiar. Looking back, I see that I downloaded SkyAngelPlan in around September 2009. Obviously at the time it didn't catch my imagination. Is that an earlier incarnation of SkyDemon?




John

G-JONL - Sportcruiser

Diary of a Sportcruiser kit aircraft builder

Hi John

Sounds like a bug, if another piece of software is able to correctly split the flights into separate entries. The Garmin probably supplies the data as one long flight, and some additional processing might be required to split them. Without having the device here it's difficult to test this, but if you can provide us with the data in some kind of raw format we'll take a look.

And yes SkyDemon was originally called SkyAngel when it was in preview form, but we weren't able to use that name.

Thanks for the reply Tim. Attached is a raw data file from my 296 GPS. This was obtained via a USB port monitor and is the actual data stream sent from the GPS to MapSource as a result of a track download request (MapSource is a Garmin mapping product that ships with the GPS). MapSource is able to interpret this as 18 separate tracks, each with start and elapsed time stamps. MapSource then saves the track data as a .GDB file, which is superficially very similar to the raw track data (I haven't analysed the data sets in detail). I can provide the .GDB file as well if you think it will help.



I've also uploaded the track request that was sent by MapSource TO the GPS in order to start the download, just in case the command is a different one to that which SD sends.



As a software developer myself, I'm quite handy with hex editors and interpreting data sets, so if I can assist further, please do ask.

John

G-JONL - Sportcruiser

Diary of a Sportcruiser kit aircraft builder

Thanks, but unfortunately I don't think it'll be straightforward to plug the raw datastream into our Garmin communication layer. If you could attach the GDB it might help, but best of all would be to sit down with the device on a debug machine to work out why our parser is finding 1 flight when apparently there are 18.

Any plans to fly down south in the near future?

Oh, OK. Not sure how else I can get it to you. Couldn't you stream it into your comms layer using something like Hyperterminal on another PC? I've done that sort of thing before when trying to nail down this sort of problem. Or write a simple test harness that receives the tracks request command and streams the response back via USB.



On further investigation, the .GDB file bears no real relationship to the raw data from the GPS, so I can't see that that will help. It's effectively an internal file format for MapSource.



I'll be down in Poole for a few days around the end of November (Mother's birthday) and it would be good to meet but in the meantime, there must be hundreds of 296s in the immediate locale - it is one of the most common aviation GPS out there.

John

G-JONL - Sportcruiser

Diary of a Sportcruiser kit aircraft builder

Indeed - and our initial Garmin support was written while testing with somebody's 296 which they lent us, which had many flight logs stored in it, all of which came out separately. There is a peculiarity happening in this specific case. We have a large number of customers using Garmin devices and successfully importing their track logs individually.

Don't get me wrong - I want to fix this. I will ask our Garmin guy if he's heard of this sort of thing happening before.

That's interesting. If it works with other 296s then that unfortunately raises the spectre of firmware version or configuration differences in the 296.



My firmware is version 4.08. I use "Fill" as my record mode (it fills the track memory then stops recording rather than overwriting old tracks). I can't see any other relevant configuration options.



Happy to bring the GPS with me at the end of November but I do really need it in the meantime. I'll play some more and see if I can shed further light on the problem.

John

G-JONL - Sportcruiser

Diary of a Sportcruiser kit aircraft builder

Would you mind uploading or sending us the one large track log file, as obtained and saved from SkyDemon?

Yes, very happy to do this but I'm just about to leave for a trip down south (not Poole) so it will have to be early next week.

John

G-JONL - Sportcruiser

Diary of a Sportcruiser kit aircraft builder