Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Garmin Vivoactive HR review

Little off subject but since I don't want to start a new blog for this I will write my review on the new Garmin Vivoactive HR here.

I bought my Garmin Vivoactive HR about a week ago and have been using it steadily for that week. I have been wearing a Timex triathlon series watch for a long time.     I paid $249.00 at Best Buy getting the last one they had in the store.  I have not seen another one in any store since.  I see a lot of Vivoactive's but not the HR version.   So to get one you may have to look online and there are many sources.  So far I am not seeing anyone giving a discount from the $249 suggested retail price including Garmin outlet stores.  I am seeing that Best Buy will be restocked on Wednesday, May 18. 

What can this thing do?  Well just about everything.  It is good to 50m in the pool or 5 Atmospheres. Not recommended for ocean swimming.  It has apps from running, swimming, rowing, walking, skiing, golf and bicycling.  Both indoor and outdoor is supported.

The HR part is the fact that you no longer have to have a strap around the chest to measure heart rate. It is measured using lasers on the wrist.  So far I found that the only problem with it is when you drive home and the the wheels need balanced, your heart rate may reach 150.   Nice to make your watch think you are doing an intense workout.  Take the watch hand off the wheel and it drops to 85.  Probably where it should be when you drive that fast.

I have taken multiple walks with it.  It will tell you the distance you walked, steps taken and the elevation gain made or lost.  It counts floors of stairs you have taken in a day.  I went up the escalator at Sears actually moving my feet and it gave me credit for a floor climbed.  When you get home and sink it with your smart phone or laptop it will give you a gps look at the course you walked, your heart rate and pace throughout the trip.  Your overall times and split times at each mile are also recorded.

Don't like the apps and the order they are on the watch.  Don't worry.  Editing them is very simple.  Turning on and off Bluetooth as simple task.  It should be done at night anyway.  You sleep better without the Bluetooth  radio waves in the room.  When you turn it back on, it will sink with your smart phone or tablet and post your results to the internet where you can see your results on any other devices you have.  I have been able to connect with desktop Windows 7, laptop Windows 8, Android tablet 4.4 Kitkat and Android smart phone 5.0. 

The sleep monitoring feature is interesting.  If you take a nap in the afternoon, it will try to get you up and moving.  At night if you slip and take your watch off, it will think your in deep sleep for that period.  It counts sleep time from the time you get still until the time you are fully up.  It monitors deep sleep, light sleep and awake periods.  Not sure on the accuracy of that but the sleep time is very close.  I woke up, took off the watch and took a shower and counted my shower time as deep sleep. 

I tried to play a round of golf.  I will have to get back with you later on the scorecard feature.  The distance to green was very helpful.  It shows front and back.  It will also tell you what kind of shot you need if you plan to lay up.  I plan to play again sometime where I can try the scorecard and swing analysis.  I drove a golf cart and it still gave me credit for walking the course. 

On the social side, it does let you connect with your friends who use Garmin products.  If they use anything else, you are out of luck.  It will show them your recorded workouts and steps taken in the day.   My wife who uses Fitbit has to tell me how she is doing.  If someone knows a solution to that, I would love to hear about it in the comments.  The weekly challenge is fun.  I finished 5th in the steps taken category for the week, and I didn't have a day and a half on it.  Already in second place on week two.  I expect to do well since I work on my feet.  I am easily seeing 10k steps a day.  I saw over 2000 steps taken on my first hour of work on Sunday.

That said, I am not satisfied with the answers I am seeing on the steps.  As I walk, I can look down and see 2 to 3 steps click off as I walk 1.  I did try using the custom steps but even there it isn't accurate because then you have got to move on the dance floor to get steps.  My old fashion pedometer is reading more steps then my watch.  Right now it is 1500 steps difference.  Maybe the shaking in the car is adding to the pedometer.

The battery life on it is good.  I went 5 days without recharging it.  The golf took a lot out of the battery.  Finding a spare charger cord in a store is a challenge.  The only place I have seen one is online for $29.00 at garmin.com.  So take care of your cord and don't lose it.  You can plug it into any USB port and charge it.  Doesn't take long.

Other features is it does play music.  I tried to put a book on mp3 onto the watch and it did not have room for it.  So manage the space wisely. 

Anyway, that is my view on the first week with the product.  I have lost a whole pound so far and am looking forward to seeing how active I can be. 



Saturday, March 12, 2016

vERAM review

Now that I am at ZAN, I have been consulting with the FE and others at  Anchorage on the new program vERAM. vERAM will be a great program for those who like vSTARS.  Ross Carlson has upped his game on this one. Setup is simple and and once you download and install the facility it is simple to maintain.  Challanges can come in when trying to vector for approach.  There is nothing to aid in vectoring including the fact that the screen faces true north and not magnetic north.  Like vSTARS, the radar is king.  Certain airports may require the aircraft to climb to 7000 feet before radar contact can be established.   By the same token, desending into those airports you'll have to clear them for the approach and then drop tag as you allow them to report back to you on IFR cancellations.  That is because of the long ranges of the radar.  Aircraft may even lose radar contact as they fly thru holes in the radar coverage.  Some aircraft (/A) might not be seen at all if only secondary radar is available.  All in all, I think it will be a great boon for the VATSIM community.   

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Resigned

I am moving on.  I am no longer the FE for ZFW so will not continue to post here about FE issues.   I have moved my primary ARTCC to ZAN and continue to hold a visitor rating at ZFW.  The dottoxml program is still mine and I will keep it up to date if anyone has any issues let me know and I will get to the bottom of it.   Thanks.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

ZFW_VRC

This week the TA at ZFW, Christos K, created a new program for use with VRC call ZFW_VRC.  I am going to try to give my opinion on the product and the way it can be used in the context of controlling at ZFW. 

First of all I have a new computer and a new job so I have not been spending a lot of time at ZFW doing my job as Facility Engineer.  Fortunately there has been little change in the last six months in the ZFW charts and have not had a huge need for my services. 

That said, I sent a letter to ZFW controllers and I will copy and paste that letter here.  Hopefully it will explain my position on the subject for future reference. 


Dear Controllers:
After having seen the files that Christos published.  I will have to say it
is a great idea.    However, While I did have a chance to look at it before
it was published, I did not have a chance to endorse it or give more than a
few lines of comment.   The toolkit portion is a great product and I
believe should remain available.  I use it while both controlling and
flying and it is a good quick way to get to a lot of information about ZFW.
 

The Downside is the sector file, and the alias file are not compatible with
what has been published.  At this point I do not intend to support the
complete.sct2 or the zfw.sct2 file.  The latter file being 180000 lines(14
MB).  Problems include old names for arrivals and departures and old AIRACs
for waypoints.  The KDFW_ASDEX.sct2 will be supported and I will be placing
it on the web site as a separate download after a few changes to the
executive parking area are made.  Future updates in the sector files will
include individual tracon sector files like OKC2012.sct2 and D10.sct2.
Plans are for SHV, GGG, ACT, ABI, MAF, and LBB.   If there is a need for
SJT, let me know.   I do have the raw data but have not done anything with
it yet. 

With the alias files, download the old alias file and place that on the
page and use it.  There are some commands that Christos added that are good
however, he based this one on an old alias file and does not have the
updates that have been added over the last two years.    Some of his added
commands only work with the zfw.sct2. file.

For old controllers, I recommend that you keep VRC the way you had it and
only download the toolbox.  For new controllers, while you may need it to
help you get thing set up, I would recommend that as you move to approach
and center that you download the supported sector files and alias files and
replace them in your setup.  I do recommend that all approach controlling
be with vStars. VRC should only be used if you do not have vStars installed
yet.  See my video on youtube if you want to see how to set up vStars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ94VkY9jeg 

I am right now in the process of getting a new computer up to speed and
will be getting to the projects in the near future.  Keep on controlling.

Tim Roden
Facility Engineer
fe@zfwartcc.org


Wednesday, July 4, 2012

vStars setup

If you are having issues making vStars usable.  Watch this video.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Progress to date.

As the facility engineer for zfwartcc on vatsim, http://www.zfwartcc.com http://vatsim.net.   I have been hard at work.  Since vStars came out in the middle of January,  I have been trying create facilities for it.  So far we have created Regional(D10), Oklahoma City(OKC), Waco(ACT), Longview(GGG) and we are working on Lubbock(LBB).  Plans are to create Shreveport(SHV), Midland(MAF), Abilene(ABI),  Monroe(MLU) and San Angelo(SJU),  As I get more I will be updating. Hopefully i can use this blog to publish them.  I have been publishing them in Team Speak.  Two programs I have been working on are dattoxml.  A program to convert dat files from the FAA through freedom of information to XML (Video Files) and (sct) sector files.  Ryan Null, http://zjx.rnull.info/naco2vrc.php wrote a good one using PHP but it was limited to 5mb files.  Some of the VFR files were larger.  This should fix that problem.  Hopefully I will have that available today on this site.  The other is a new sweatbox program.  In testing the files I found tower trainer very good for many operations and ACSIM good for others.  What I am trying to do is combine the two and adding some features that I have used with Euroscope.   I am trying to get real world results from the commands given.  Example.  aircraft flying at 11000 doing 250 knots have a ground speed anywhere from 250 to 310 knots depending on wind conditions.  Euroscope shows that the other two programs don't.  Stay tuned as we create updates.