24 July - 500 km Triangle

I flew a practice task today - a 500 km triangle as shown by the red lines on the satellite shot below.  The satellite also shows the cloudstreets that were running SE-NW through the flying area.  The yellow line shows the sea breeze convergence zone off to the SE coming from the Gulf of Mexico.  Today it was a long way away and of no consequence to the flight.  Some days, it rolls all the way in to the task area and can either create a great run along it, or it can also bring a line of thunderstorms that cause problems.

To help orient the task area, the green dot represents Uvalde and the large red dot, San Antonio, 80 miles to the east.  To the south, the blue dot is Laredo and to the west, the pink dot is Del Rio.  The line from Del Rio to Laredo is the Rio Grande and the Mexican Border.

The flight today went reasonably well, at an average of 130 km/hr, but I did have some trouble along the leg south towards the second turnpoint and then it started to blue out about 15 km north from the turnpoint.  I rounded the 2nd turn at 4000 after working some less than optimal lift on the way in and then hit a good 5 kt climb in the blue after the turnpoint.

The leg to the NE was downwind and lined up nicely with the cloudstreets.  Conditions also improved as I hit a 10 kt climb up to 8900 ft.  I was able to run the 163 km distance in 59 minutes.  This was a great improvement after the slow second leg!

Tomorrow, I plan to go through the registration process and work on my flarm.  I installed it at home, but for some reason it is not talking to the LX.  First step in trouble-shooting is to connect the remote display instead of the LX and see if that fixes it.  If that works, then it is either a setting on the LX that I missed, or a bad cable between the flarm and LX.