I ordered this book a couple of weeks back. Haven't had much time to actually read it but what I have read has been really interesting - makes quite a change from the Pilot Handbook or Touching Cloudbase.
As i'm off to the Alps very shortly its come at the perfect time and from what i've seen it seems to cover everything i could possibly want to know about thermal flying.
I ordered my copy from Northern Paragliding and received it the very next day - how's that for service!
Having bought my Garmin GPS recently I now have needed to locate some maps to upload into it to make life more interesting (my street is a blank space on the basemap that is supplied with the GPS). Given the relatively high cost of Garmin MapSource products (£129), I started to trawl the Internet and asked in a forums for advice and alternatives:
UK CAA Airspace overlays
http://ukgarminairmap.wikispaces.com/
Free Garmin Maps
http://garminmapsearch.com/
I haven't tried any of these yet (my new PC doesn't have a serial port and so I have had to order a card - still waiting!). Will post an update when I get a Map into the GPS.
Just placed an order for a GPS. I had been debating for a while whether to buy a GPS and when. Given my currentlevels of experience I probably don't need one just yet, but will if I want go on Carlo's SIV/XC course in Turkey next year (i'll write something about SIV at a later date). Carlo recommended the Garmin Map 76S (pictured above) but I noticed recently that Garmin have released a new version with colour maps. Colour maps would have been very nice I'm sure - but with a price tag of about £300 it seemed a bit costly. I'd been keeping an eye on prices over at www.blokesstuff.com and I just noticed last night that they dropped another £25 of the price of the black and white version. So, I quickly snapped one up at £149. For the amount of use its going to get, I think the B+W version will do me just fine.
Just ordered myself some new equipment - so this nice new Vario should be on its way to me any day now, along with a cockpit and Sup-Air flying suit! The Vario should make finding the lift a little easier in the future.
I've been paragliding since 2005 and thought it would be good to have somewhere I could post pictures and a bit of info about my flying. I'm based in Milton Keynes and so fly mostly at Dunstable - see links below for other Dunstable pilots.
