going digital for hopefully the last time by Joe Zvada / Balloonpong
M
y affection for the paper map instead of an electronic map has been well documented, but it hasn’t been for lack of trying the electronic options. Several attempts to go digital have only resulted in poorer flying performance and always led me right back to the old trusty paper. I have never been able to strike that balance with an electronic map where the benefits outweighed the potential costs of an untimely computer crash. The simpleness of the paper and pencil gave me a sense of security that allowed me to focus more on the flying. All that may change, though, with a new tool that may tip the balance in favor of the electronic option. oziTarget is a tool developed by Australian Sean Kavanagh that is an add-on program to the popular mapping software, OziExplorer. As a long time competitor, Kavanagh designed and built Target specifically for modern day competition ballooning, featuring user friendly ways to do some of our most important tasks like plotting a flight line or drawing scoring areas among others. To accompany the software, Kavanagh has made considerable effort to create educational documents and YouTube videos about the software and about his personal procedures and preferences. The existence of these educational materials is what has recently convinced me to make another attempt at going digital and after viewing just a couple of the YouTube videos I was optimistic that oziTarget may finally be the answer to replace my paper map and perhaps even do much more. But in past trials, the computer itself has often been the biggest liability. Finding a reliable and powerful laptop that is the right size and price has always been 44 Ballooning
a challenge. A computer may work for a while, but then at the most inopportune moment would crash and send me scrambling during a flight. For this new attempt at electronic mapping I’ve settled on the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet as a potential solution to the computing problems, in part because it is the machine that Kavanagh uses as his software testing and competition platform. Like any tool one adds to their flying, it takes time to learn it and learn how it will fit into your own personal flying style. I identified three main functions that I need the computer to do efficiently and reliably in order to replace my paper map; waypoint creation, plotting flight lines, and creating scoring areas/PZs. In past attempts at electronic mapping, I was never able to make these tasks easy enough or quick enough on the computer to justify not using the paper. Waypoints – In oziTarget, it is surprisingly simple to create a new waypoint. The easiest being to simply use the “Pick Wpt from map” tool
which allows you to place a waypoint on an intersection with just the tap of the stylus. The second method is to manually input waypoint coordinates, but oziTarget allows the input of only the four digits given on the task sheet as opposed to entering the whole seven or eight digit coordinate required in previous mapping softwares. Plotting the waypoints quickly like this allows me to spend more time visualizing the tasks and trying to understand how the Director conceptualized the flight with the given weather. Plotting Wind Lines – I’ve never found an efficient way to do this electronically until oziTarget. Plotting the wind line is crucial for me in choosing PDG and FON tasks and has always been easier and quicker to do by hand on paper. The oziTarget feature called HDG Hold can be used to quickly draw a line on the map on a desired degree line just by inputting the degree and selecting a point on the map. Scoring Areas – oziTarget’s Scoring Area tool provides two ways to draw a scoring area on the map. The first is to
Creating waypoints in oziTarget requires the user to enter only a 4-digit coordinate
www.bfa.net