Information about Hot Air Balloon Competitions by Mathijs R. de Bruijn.

GPS Loggers in Hot Air Balloon competitions.

This page is dedicated to the use of GPS Loggers in HAB competitions. First experiments started in around 2000 and a lot has been learned since. In the beginning loggers were only used as an additional observation tool. In the World Championship 2002 the Director penalised pilots for the first time for flying in clouds based on the information of loggers. Now the time is ripe to develop procedures for their use as task setting a scoring tools. First experiments were made in Luxemburg, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.

The purpose of this page is to deal with the technical details of this development, not with the 'political' issue of abandoning the use of Observers. Issues to be addressed in the near future are:

• Reducing technical failure rates (mainly caused by power problems like empty batteries and auto shut down by high sunlight temperatures).
• Developing and optimising handling procedures for pilots.
• Reducing human errors during downloading and track data saving, and speeding up this process by automation.
• Producing software to automatically calculate results from downloaded data.

I have asked several persons to write reports of their experiences in competitions, some of which I have directed or flown in. I like to thank them very much for writing these reports and think that a lot can be learned from these reports.

1. Roehn Cup 2001, Wildflecken Germany by Mathijs de Bruijn (observation tool)
2. Mol-cup 2003 Debrecen , Hungary by Mike Meinl. (observation tool)
3. Mobilux 2003 Bourscheid, Luxemburg by Marcus Blaha. (scoring and task setting)
4. 1st round in Somogybabod 2003, Hungary by Marcus Blaha. (scoring and task setting)
5. Spanish Nationals 2003 Valladolid, Spain by Claude Weber (scoring and task setting)
6. Pre-Europeans 2004 Debrecen, Hungary by Tony Molony (scoring and task setting)
7. Polish Nationals 2006 Wloclawek, Poland by Mathijs de Bruijn (scoring and task setting)
8. MOL Cup 2006 Debrecen, Hungary by Mathijs de Bruijn (scoring and task setting)
9. Comparing Baro and GPS altitudes, Sep 2005 by Mathijs de Bruijn (discussion document)