Wind measurement values on the Vario

January 27, 2019

Who would like to see current wind values from surrounding meteo stations on his Vario? Syride and Burnair offer appropriate solutions. The display of current wind measurements on a Sys'Evolution. // Source: Syride.com Syrides Top Vario Sys'Evolution recently got a firmware update. One of the innovations: Now you can display current wind measurements of weather stations in the respective flight region on the display. For this, the Sys'Evolution needs to be paired with a smartphone via Bluetooth to gain access to the Internet. The current wind data is then taken from the meteo website winds.mobi. This page, which is available both in the classic WWW as well as a smartphone app, aggregates measurements from a variety of wind measurement networks such as Holfuy, Pioupiou, FFVL, Meteoswiss and more. With the Sys'Evolution, several wind displays can be set up on the display: a specific wind measuring station of your choice, the nearest wind measuring station, the next station in the valley and the next on a mountain peak, for example. This can give the pilot an overview of how the current wind conditions in his environment are. For each wind station, the altitude and the time of the last measurement are also displayed. SkyNet ground station draws wind data from the cloud Bernie Hertz shows a SkyNet ground station. It queries Windstationswerte the environment on the Internet and sends them via Fanet radio data to Varios. // Source: Burnair.ch In principle, current wind measurement data can already be seen by Varios, who master the fanet standard (currently Skytraxx, other suppliers will follow). But this would require special ground stations that transmit the values of an anemometer via fan data radio to the Varios in their environment. Such Fanet-capable meteostats are already available as a prototype, but not yet on the market. The Swiss Bernie Hertz from Burnair.ch has developed an interesting and, in principle, cheaper version, together with several helpers. Rather than equipping local meteo stations with Fanet, his system called SkyNet is simply pulling data from existing stations off the Internet. Like Syride, Burnair cooperates closely with Winds.mobi, for example, and accesses various wind nets. Clubs or even interested individual pilots should be able to set up a SkyNet ground station easily in their grounds, without the great technical knowledge would be necessary. It is basically just a small black box with fan antenna, integrated electronics and an internet connection (Wifi). Different wind measurement station values on the display of a Skytraxx 3.0 // Source: Burnair.ch The stations are programmed to log on to servers of the SkyNet service independently and then, as it were, "from the cloud" automatically retrieves the measurement data from Obtain stations from the area. These values are then routed by radio to Fanet-enabled Varios nearby. They appear there as wind vane symbols and mileage information in the map display. At the same time, each SkyNet box also serves as a relay station to forward current position data of the active Fanet Varios in the environment to live tracking servers such as the Open Glider Network (OGN). According to Burnair's plans, you will not be able to buy the Skynet ground stations, you can only rent them. Monthly usage fees (price not yet determined) will include both the transmission of wind values and the OGN integration. Recently, the first SkyNet boxes are available on request for a beta test of the system.

This article has been translated for your convenience and was originally written in German.