[miguel]

If it is still for sale, I would like to buy it.

[Bill Cummings]

Miguel,
Rick's post has renewed my interest in trying to blending it back into my flying. If I can't do that then I think I will put it up for sale.

[miguel]

No problem. I think it is a viable concept.

How about a users report?

[Bill Cummings]

No problem. I think it is a viable concept.

How about a users report?

Miguel,
It may take me awhile with a users report since I just bought my first ever 4X4 vehicle for hang gliding. I’m in the process of getting it ready for a front bumper rack, rigging it out to sleep in the back, add a trailer hitch, make privacy curtains, mounting the deep cycle battery, etc, etc.

It has been a long while since I last used the Snooper. One application that I did find very useful when I was flying with it was on overcast days in very weak thermal conditions. Days that had little wind to distort the shape of an ideal thermal.

It was quite easy for me to stay centered in a thermal since while I was in the thermal the Thermal Snooper would remain quiet. When I neared the edge of the thermal the lower Boop Boop, cooling sound , would let me know to turn away from the edge sooner and not fall out of the thermal. As I was headed back to where I belonged it would Beep Beep, warming sound , for a short while then remain quiet again when I centered around the core.

On windy days I found it to be very confusing. I did best when I would shut off either the vario or the Snooper. Both running at the same time telling me about two different situations that sometimes didn’t coincide and sometimes did coincide could and did make me scream! Add to this a small dose of hypoxia and you will be ready for a straightjacket. I would recommend experimenting at lower altitudes.
BC.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Looks like I'm off the hook selling it since Al sold his equipment. He is pursuing Part 103 trikes now so as not to deal with a bunch of snipping hang glider pilots.

I'm very sorry that Al sold his hang gliding equipment because I really liked his help here on the forum, and I was looking forward to him finally getting past the training ... and into the fun of flying.

But I'm really glad to hear that he's getting into trikes, and I just hope he gets good instruction. I'd be happy to have him stop in here to discuss his trike progress any time.

Al, Thanks, Good Luck, and please keep us posted with your future flying adventures.   

[Bob Kuczewski]

On windy days I found it to be very confusing. I did best when I would shut off either the vario or the Snooper. Both running at the same time telling me about two different situations that sometimes didn’t coincide and sometimes did coincide could and did make me scream! Add to this a small dose of hypoxia and you will be ready for a straightjacket.

That makes me wonder if it wouldn't make a lot of sense to combine the vario and thermal snooper inputs into a single processor that could use them both to make a single recommendation. I suspect that processing technology wasn't available in the original Thermal Snooper days (without flying an Apple IIe strapped to your back). Now that kind of processing power weighs no more than your watch.

[danstrider]

I am working to back out the circuit of the original Thermal Snooper. My hope is to be able to reproduce the snooper and study the information it gives.

A few years ago, I developed and autonomous soaring algorithm for model sailplanes using a variometer and a GPS. With that, I flew several cross country flights over 100km and 5hr with a 4m span sailplane. The snooper has caught my eye because it may provide information at a much greater range than the vario, but it appears to take more effort to learn how to interpret the signal into what a pilot does worth that information. To do this, I have to hook into the output of the sensor directly, hence remaking the circuit. The plan is to capture the vario, GPS, and the snooper data simultaneously to see what correlations can be made.

Unfortunately, Alan Fisher, the designer of the snooper, died in 2011 and took the circuit with him. Any help with pictures of an exposed circuit or source to buy one so I can very carefully disassemble it would be helpful.

The best clue on the web is an internet archive of the old comeclones website, albeit without the pictures:
http://web.archive.org/web/200907311329 ... ooper2.htm

Rick M., if you're still active in this forum and perhaps have more information, I found your 1987 description of flying with the snooper intriguing. Here is an archive for completeness:
http://web.archive.org/web/200906121226 ... lusion.htm

If anyone can provide information on the circuit or perhaps has a unit they're willing to part with, please let me know!

Thanks,
Dan

PS: One day I'd love to bring out my Goat for some slope flying with you hang glider guys ... gotta finish it first though (http://green-air.blogspot.com)

[Rick Masters]

As far as I know, the next phase of thermal sensing is wide open to whoever has the ability to do it.
It will involve taking the original proven Thermal Snooper design - not starting with the untried Snooper II, which is not necessarily an improvement - and linking the temperature rate of increase data with variometer rate of ascent/descent data, combined with GPS and altitude data, to generate a 3D map (on a display as you fly) of
1) the turbulent air around the thermal
2) the thermal core.
The thermal will be drawn as if with a brush (your glider) as you travel in the vicinity.
Once you get that to work, link up with wireless to another glider with the same gear flying a couple thousand feet away on a parallel course. Now you are mapping the thermal activity along a cross country route.
Now link up with several other gliders and go for it.

[danstrider]

Many thanks Rick.

For what it's worth to the discussion, the autonomous soaring work I did essentially took the GPS location (corrected for wind drift) as the 2D horizontal location and the netto vario signal as the 3D data, then did a nonlinear best-fit of a 3D Gaussian distribution curve to the last 45s of 4Hz measurements. Restating for clarity, the last 45s of variometer measurements and the GPS position of the aircraft were used to figure out the most likely location of the center of a normal-shaped thermal. In my case, this location was then fed to an autopilot as an orbit location, but I experimented a bit with an in-flight display for pilots that showed the vario data and the estimated thermal. Quite frankly, I didn't have any hangglider or full-scale sailplane friends at the time to try the display, so this idea died on the vine. The one real magic trick was to have an estimate of the horizontal winds in order to shift the GPS inertial coordinates into wind-drift coordinates. Others have tried to simply couple the vario reading to a turn-rate controller so the measurements and the controller are both in the wind frame, which has proven to work in limited testing, but will not work for a pilot's display instrument.

Also for what it's worth, cooperative autonomous soaring is in its infancy, but does work for sailplanes in close proximity. Nobody has yet really cracked the nut on how to handle separate thermals, but it does work to alert a nearby vehicle at roughly the same altitude where to find a thermal. How to handle large altitude differences is also an open question.

Dan

[Bob Kuczewski]

Hi Dan,

That sounds like some good work!!

One of the things you might include is a storage of the GPS, vario, and temperature sensing data so you can possibly use an adaptive learning algorithm to make better models of thermals than the gaussian distribution that you've mentioned. It would be really slick if that modelling could be done in real time!!

Thanks for keeping us posted on your work!!

P.S. If you search for "snooper" on our forum, you'll get a lot of hits. I don't know if any of them will be helpful (topics do digress), but it's something you could try ... if you haven't already.