SAFA Skysailor Magazine

20 SKY SAILOR January | February 2022 Note the XML feed ID. This ID can be used in some of the tools we are now going to discuss. Highcloud.net www.highcloud.net is a website run by one of the quiet achievers of the Oz scene, Geoff Wong. Geoff started putting together the site about 10 years ago. On the site, Geoff runs the scoring side of the Australian competition scene. Of interest to us is the ‘Pilot Locator’ section, where you can select a pilot and see them on a map in real-time. Geoff can create groups of pilots, for instance if a bunch of you are heading off somewhere. Geoff currently caters for Garmin, Spot and Skylines, but if other devices bring out a free and uncom- plicated API, he will be happy to add them. To register your device, send an email to Geoff with your relevant feed ID. Flytrace.com I came across this site a few years back. At the time it only handled Spot devices and I actually contacted the developers to suggest incorpo- rating Garmin. They sent me the code, which was OOP’d well beyond my functional-oriented programming brain! Anyway, they’ve since included Garmin, so this is another option. If you go to www.flytrace.com , you will see the Spot and inReach Aggregator. Select that, then follow the links to register or log in. Once you’ve done that, you can create a group and add pilots to it, entering their name, Spot feed ID or Garmin page link. It will give you a public map link for the group which you can then share. Dropping that link into the address bar of a web browser will bring up a map with all of your group’s trackers displayed. XC Guide app Finally, we come to XC Guide. This, in my view, is the pick of the bunch. I first became aware of this app when I was browsing through the aviation-oriented apps on the Google Play site back in 2016. Back then it was part of a suite of three apps with ‘XC Pilot Retrieve’ and ‘Retriever Bus’, developed by a mate of Jocky Sanderson’s going under the nom-de-plume of ‘Indy Flyer’. Since then, it has developed into a powerful and capable flight instrument, but with the insanely handy capability of taking tracking feeds from a multitude of sources and display- ing them on a map. If you fly with an Air3, or a suitable similarly equipped device, you’ll love this bit – you can configure XC Guide to run in the background and feed data through a port in XC Track (Base and Pro versions), XC Soar and LK8000 and see all those other aircraft in real-time on the map screen. This will work on your mobile phone as well if you are running any of those three applications. Tracking sources that can be configured and displayed are extensive: Spot, inReach, Flymas- ter, ADS-B, FLARM, FANET, OGN (Open Glider Network), SkyLines, LiveTrack24, AirWhere, and XCGlobe. Situational awareness or what? Before we go any further though, I’m going to disappoint half of you – it’s Android only and will remain that way. A solution is to buy a cheap Android phone. To set up the inReach and Spot feeds on your mobile phone, I would suggest using a mirroring software solution on your PC so you Tools for Tracking