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lurch

First Flight Review: Tony Suits Apache Rebel

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I'll try to be brief and to the point.

I have put three flights on mine and I am thunderstruck.

Up until I flew this wing I wasn't sure I believed a suit that flies like this was even possible.
It is.
I am jawdropped. Stunned. Completely, utterly, floored.
The suit blew my mind. This thing let me go back up. My altimeter registered a fallrate of -21mph. Yes you read that right. Minus 21 mph. At will. It can climb. Easily. Pretty much whenever you want to.

It was not a fluke of airflow, a data spike or an artifact of altimeter position. Playback of the maneuver from altimeter records shows a clean smooth rampdown to 0mph, continuing past baseline through the teens to -20, -19, -21mph, gradually slowing and reversing once again past zero into normal flight as I went over the top and bled off what little speed was required to get this.

I didn't even know my altimeter could DO that!

It feels exactly like a high speed exit except I don't need a CASA or a Skyvan to do it anymore. Just an act of will.

It can be done just on the energy carried by flying with other suits. An actual dive is not even necessary.

My experience with wingsuits is extensive and spans nine years of wingsuit development. Nothing I have flown came anywhere near to what this suit is capable of. This is a quantum leap forward in performance and has opened up a shocking new range of speeds, flights and possibilities. It goes so far beyond anything I ever expected to get out of a suit I found myself sputtering enthusiastic gibberish in foreign languages I don't even SPEAK, trying to describe this after landing.

I have sought after flight like this for my entire career. Never quite believing in it but chasing it all the same. Its here. Its real. And I get to fly it because I went and bought one.

My Altitrack logged deployment the first time I twitched a wing after exit resulting in an inadvertant little planeout below 21 mph. However the Altitrack continues recording to the ground, so it does capture every maneuver regardless of whether it thinks I'm under canopy or not.

Playback of the records it is producing show flight results so impossible that last week I'd have laughed at any pilot claiming them.

Its default fallrate range, flown in a relaxed, effortless manner ranges from roughly 9-39mph with a 135 lb pilot. Flown dirty, it can be used to stay with x2's S-Birds and similar large suits but it is difficult to restrain the suit to the limitations of other suits and so far as I am aware there is nothing else in existence that even comes close. This suit creates and occupies a whole new class by itself.
There are all other suits and then there is THIS one. And this one goes, Beyond. To the point of seeming completely unreal. I can't believe it, but it is stubbornly real, nevertheless.

After flying briefly with a friend armed with an X-Bird with my wings scrunched down to almost nothing, I unleashed the thing and let it fly. The X-Bird, flown all-out by my companion cameraman, disappeared below me like a dropped anchor.

Within seconds the windblast died off to total silence. For as long as your forward speed lasts, it can essentially hover for as long as the user wants it to. This suit is to the X-Bird what the X-Bird is to a Birdman Classic... a suit so obsolete many wingsuit pilots will never see one. It can be flown to the edge of stall resulting in an almost complete standstill on all axes. Forward speed and fallrate slowly built up after that. It is effectively a wearable high performance canopy and flies much like one.

"How long your arms can take it" is no longer a question or even a relevant factor. Choose your wingload by how tightly you shut the variable airlocks. The numbers I state in this review were accomplished with the locks OPEN. The available power only goes UP from there. The suit's MINIMUM setting is so far beyond all other suits' range that attempting to compare them is ridiculous.

The suit can planeout to zero mph from almost any available fallrate and forward speed, and can get a solid, measurable climb with just the energy left over from typical flocking fallrates of 50-80 mph.

The pressurization is extreme. So much so that it takes nearly 100% of the muscle strain out of flight. An all-out flight of 3:45 to 4 minutes in an S-Bird required serious effort to accomplish and was difficult to repeat at will. In this suit it requires next to no effort at all. My best guess as to this suit's ultimate potential is somewhere between five and five and a half minutes of freefall/flight. This just can't be called freefall anymore. There is nothing "Falling" about it.

You can go completely limp in this suit with all the airlocks left open and it will sustain a sub-40's fallrate anyway. Add the slightest amount of wing and it plunges to the low 30's to low 20's. It prefers to cruise in the mid to low 20's, if allowed to choose its own default flight. Pick up the grippers and flick the wings just-so and it will deliver either low teens, single digits, or actual, dramatic, unmistakable climbs with nothing but an effort of will and the correct technique depending on how fast you were going when you do so. The power put at the user's fingertips is nothing short of Godlike.

The workmanship is flawless. With the BASE soles reinforcing the one weakness I ever found in other Tony suits this suit appears indestructible and will never wear out.
The grippers do not need to be gripped. Released, they do not flap. The suit does almost all the work. The user has but to choose how it should be flown and choose the correct shape for the fallrate and speeds desired. The resulting usable flight range has so far gone from 90 to -21mph. I have yet to push this thing to high enough speeds to find out what its diving Terminal is or what it will permit me to do once I have acquired that much kinetic energy. I look forward to finding out.

I will post more to this thread as I learn how to really use this thing. If this is what its like just getting started, then...?
-B
Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

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thanks can you tell us more about the suits features size differences (leg and arm compared to other top end suit) maybe some pics?

not to question your flights but Gary performed a pretty aggressive flare that didnt at all look anything like climbing didnt really change glide substancially either, somehow i just cant see most having the same experiance as you unless something really unique is going on behind the outline i just cant see how a little bit larger arm/leg wing cant have classic to xbird differences.

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Since I'm the "video guy" that Lurch mentioned, I figured I'd throw in my observations.

I watched Lurch's Altitrack in "live playback" mode. I can confirm it registered -20 on the third jump, and you could see the fall rate increase, then decrease, then go negative in the way Lurch described. I know he had a FlySight on him, so I suspect he'll be able to export/upload the FlySight data. I assume they will match.

Regardless of that mathsturbation, It made my Xbird look like a joke. On all three jumps, we agreed to fly together for about one minute, then he'd switch to "full flight" and we'd go our separate ways. Before the first jump, I was convinced that Lurch would get a performance improvement with the suit, but it wouldn't be massive. (I didn't doubt he would get performance increases that would dwarf my Xbird's over time, but I figured that since he was jumping a suit he didn't know - and I know my suit pretty well - it wouldn't completely out perform my Xbird on Day 1.) I was wrong. Lurch is lighter than me (I'm 170 lbs without gear; he's about 135, I think); we're about the same height (about 5'10 / 5'11"); and he's got more wingsuiting experience (I've got about 900 wingsuit jumps at this point), but it was still a major surprise to watch him scrunched up, bent knees, arms back, etc., while flying next to me - I was in flat out max flight.

Back at Flock & Dock 8.0, I watched Scotty Burns fly an XRW [note - I'm not sure what the difference is between the XRW and the Rebel - I thought they were the same suit], and the video I captured (and video I collected from others) show him blasting through the sky. There's no question the suit has potential to be stupid fast. Vicente Cajiga also jumped one at that event. Perhaps either of those guys can chime in on this thread with their opinions.

One thing Lurch left out of his review - his deployments were sketchy. Not "dangerous" sketchy (from what he told me), but sort of "shit I really, really, really need a 12 foot bridle" sketchy. Lurch, give some details on this part...

A couple more thoughts - this suit is definitely not for inexperienced (or even some "advanced") wingsuiters. Particularly given the modifications that Lurch had to make on it before jumping it (to allow direct access to handles, since the factory designed zippered access ports didn't match the locations of the handles on Lurch's rig), I wouldn't suggest it to anyone with less than 500 wingsuit jumps (and there are many folks with 500 wingsuit jumps that I wouldn't recommend use it). Flocking with this suit is going to be very, very challenging - it's really a suit for folks who want to fly a lot of solos and/or have no friends. It should NOT be purchased by anyone who is simply thinking "well, it's hard for me to stay with a flock, so I should get a bigger suit..."

Personally, I'm not a fan of big suits. I like my XBird a lot, but I use my SBird for most of my day to day flocking and fun - it's plenty versatile and gives lots of great performance. I think people rush to up-size to bigger suits way too fast. And personally, I think that it's more fun to fly with friends than try to fly a giant sail alone. But having said that, if your goal is max performance, as far as I can tell this is the best tool for the job.
Skwrl Productions - Wingsuit Photography

Northeast Bird School - Chief Logistics Guy and Video Dork

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Ok to address several replies in one...

I'm 135 lb, 5 foot 10. I'd have to go get a tape measure, I've never actually checked what my wingspan is.

I can't speak for Gary nor do I know exactly what he had in mind when he set up his approach, but what I notice about the way he came in is that he spent much of his flight swaying from side to side before locking down into a straight line for the last few hundred feet. To my mind this says he came in with a lot less speed and energy than he -could- have. I'd imagine his actual flight profile and thus available range was terribly restricted by the necessity of -not missing the target-! Probably had to settle for whatever forward speed and fallrate he could get when he actually aimed it at the target. The suit didn't appear to be -really- flying until shortly before landing.

What I'm saying is that if the suit were a canopy, he looks as if he arrived with the canopy already half flared-out. I think that if he had had a longer, shallower approach run with more time for the suit to settle instead of that steep and wobbly approach, we would indeed have seen him arrive at a near-zero or true-zero fallrate, and/or a visible climb/popup before landing. And I think thats also exactly why we did NOT see those things. If he HAD, he'd have overflown his target and missed entirely because thats what an all-out zero-planeout IS. Its not that he couldn't do so, its that he chose not to so that he wouldn't miss.

re: differences...

The difference between an Apache and an X or Sbird is FAR more than simply "a little more wing". To really get it, you'd have to see a sample of, say, those three suits laid out side by side. The A is similar in size and appearance to the X series at a casual glance if one doesn't look too closely at it but the construction, characteristics and actual shapes are VERY different.

I haven't flown an Xbird myself actually...never came across one that fit me well enough to bother test flying it. The X itself was extremely impressive, but the fit of the ones I got my hands on was poor enough that I'd get better performance out of a properly fit S-bird than I would have out of an X that fits me like a tent so I didn't bother.

To my eyes, the X and X2 are both essentially hyperextended S-Birds. Same suit, just a little bigger. Its also why I never bought one. I knew it wouldn't get me THAT much more performance than an S, especially since skinny guys really don't load suits that size very well, and I suspected the armwing loading would simply be too extreme for my skinny frame. I think the X's are ideal especially for heavier guys wanting serious low-fallrate flocking, but what I'm trying to drive at is that the X's are still suits whose design is three separate wings, on a suit, and still derived from the same basic chassis layout of all the "-Bird" series. The Apache is something else entirely...designed as a unit. It doesn't feel like 3 wings...it feels like one giant wing with 3 major control nodes of feet, left and right arms. The "-Bird" series (and all prior suits I've seen) are suits with wings attached to them. The Apache is a single massive inflatable wing, with a suit shape inside it. Laid out flat, the wings still take a clear, classic wing profile seen from the side. It is especially obvious if one looks at the side of the wing where the grippers are attached.

And last, is the nature of the pressurization of the suit and how effectively it makes its own shape, allowing all the user's effort to go into precisely selecting the suit's shape instead of spending the lion's share of the effort on merely keeping the suit open and the wings down.

My S-Bird, I typically left the locks wide open unless I was either flying with/taking on a particularly floaty friend or just flying a solo where I wanted everything the suit has got. But any way I fly it, the S-bird takes continuous effort to actually maintain a fallrate in the mid-20's to mid-30's. The S-Bird itself is a fantastic suit and will remain my suit for flying with others, but its just not even in the same class as the A.
Closing the locks acts as a supercharger for the S-Bird and makes it far easier to produce low fallrates, but relax and go limp and an S-Bird will pretty much fall out of the sky like a rock, as will every other suit I have ever flown. The Apache, different story. To stay DOWN with an X-Bird I had to deliberately go totally limp, then start winching in as much wing as I could until it fell fast enough to stay with the X. If I simply totally relax, go limp and do NOTHING the Apache will keep right on flying anyway at fallrates I still had to work for in other suits.

Even with all locks left wide open, the Apache's internal pressure and self-shape are far, FAR more tight and rigid than my Sbird was, all closed up. If you scaled them in sequence, it is as if Tony skipped several grades that would have been in between. An imaginary series would be...Tbird Rbird Sbird Xbird, "Ybird" and the Apache is about 2 more steps past the performance grade the "Zbird" would have occupied had it ever existed.

Bottom line is, although the increase in size relative to previous suits isn't all that dramatic, the design is so highly evolved that every significant control factor is amplified far beyond anything available in suits of similar size and appearance. Its weakest setting starts about a "Ybird" and a "Zbird" PAST where an Xbird or an Sbird max out. The single most impressive and dominant impression I got from it so far has been the fact that you get all this for zero effort whereas the best possible results from an Sbird, bought at a price of inhuman effort, still fall FAR short of where an Apache's envelope even BEGINS, flown limp with the locks open.
-B
Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

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Ok will do...

Brief detail: Up till now I've used an 8.5 foot bridle combined with a very particular wingsuit-specific packjob and a deployment technique best described as "Throw and Scrunch" to minimize the size of the burble. Up till now it has been extremely reliable and consistent in results as well.

Trouble is, with the Apache, the Scrunch part, is all but impossible. Depending on how you define it, the suit effectively cannot be shut down, and this ties in with what Skwrl just said about experience required to fly this puppy. You can make it smaller, but you can't turn it OFF.


The best I could do was to narrow the tailwing to about the width of a wide chair and that was with locks OPEN. I sure as hell could not squeeze it empty, not even close. The one flight I did with all locks totally shut, (Flight #2) I couldn't even narrow it significantly. First flight was with armwings locked and taillock open about 4 inches. I could squeeze the tail down a little. Those 4 inches of zipper travel make a HUGE difference come deployment time... forget narrowing the wing... with that last 4 inches closed, I couldn't even do THAT. It was like trying to crush an inflated tire between my knees.

The third flight, I left the armwing locks 90% open with the zipper only an inch or two away from the full-open stop and the tailwing lock 100% open and the suit STILL could not be shut down. The arms could be shut down a bit more effectively than the tail because elbows against ribcage give far more leverage with which to deform the wings, but the armwings will continue to develop dramatic wing effect no matter WHAT I do with them.

The resulting burble behind this thing compared to the burble I left behind a shutdown S-bird has to be phenomenal. All three deployments so far have been firm and twist-free but all three were also somewhat off-heading toward the right, increasing with each jump, last one being so asymmetrical that I got a nasty riser whack upside the head and neck on the left side as the canopy deployed far off to the right. I think this behavior is being triggered by the act of beginning to look and lean to the right about 2 seconds after the throw. With each one, I thought I was beginning to perceive a PC hesitation or delay, which I was rather expecting anyway and have been deploying high in anticipation of while I see how it actually works out.

My best guess as to what is happening behind my back at that moment is my PC isn't grabbing any significant air and is likely flopping loosely around in the right hand side of the burble until the delay starts to get my attention in a second or two and as I start to look and lean one way to check it out, I'm disturbing that status lockup and getting a launch, but a launch that takes off in an extremely asymmetrical fashion.

The first one or two I could just write up as variance or error...can't draw too many conclusions from just one or two jumps but three times the same way back to back makes a trend and this will likely continue until I alter my gear properly for this. I'll be getting a 12 foot bridle with at least a 26 to 28 inch ZP pilot chute as soon as possible. I could continue to jump this configuration and try to find a refined technique that will correct the problem or see if I can make it deploy more cleanly by forcing a symmetrical posture throughout and trying to keep the wings small enough but its probably not the smartest way to go. The cause and nature of the issue were pretty predictable and the solution well known already.

Next post I'll put up pics of the skydiving handle-access mod for discussion.
-B
Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

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on the 12 ft bridle - hasn't this been discourage as it was blamed for one BASE fatality and there had been a few skydiving incidents? I can't remember where I read that (maybe BASEjumper.com) but I remember when I got my new pc/bridle I ended up getting a 100 in (9ft) with a 28" pc for a then 150 triathlon (now a 117pilot) instead of the suggested 24" one that is normal for the tri 150 but then I also haven't jumped anything bigger than an X.

may or may not be useful as your skydiving/wingsuit knowledge does seem to be well above my own.

Dave

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I believe in the past 9ft. was determined to be the "best" for risk vs. reward (and probably still is for most situations). However, times (and situations) have changed and it is possible that the "best" may have changed with it ...
"That looks dangerous." Leopold Stotch

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I'll be getting a 12 foot bridle with at least a 26 to 28 inch ZP pilot chute as soon as possible.

You should also take your canopy line lengths into account. If a 9' bridle doesn't clear the burble, will a canopy with 9' lines?
Brian

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Sabre1 120 packed straight hang, no nose stuffing or rolling, 3 rolls tail and thats all. Very short line bites in the stows, several feet of the lineset freestowed on the bottom of the container, packed grommet-up. Extremely resistant to line twists this way. As in, haven't had twists in well over 1000 jumps. So far so good.
-B
Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

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Best PPC freefall time and distance for an Apache is 83.4sec, 3.93km (same jump)

Your best PPC time and distance in an S-bird is 76.1sec, 3.74km (same jump)

As you had a FlySight on the jump, why not upload the track so everyone can judge the "multi-generation" jump in performance for themselves?
How many generations are there between S-bird and the new suit?
When you talk about improvement between previous generations what percentage improvement in GR do you think there was? 7-8%?

Unfortunately there is long history of hyped claims that turned out to be untrue, so it's hard to see this thread as anything but an over enthusiastic/fanatic review or over amped advertisement at this stage.

You often talk about your experience and "ninja skills" which sounds impressive but your performance in competitions to date doesn't seem to match. I wonder how close the real world performance of this suit is to your assessment above?

To put your review in context, are you a regular customer paying full price or sponsored/paid/given a discount/ receiving any other compensation?

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Luke... The term "ninja skills" or "ninja tricks" is essentially a made-up comic technical term for specific subtleties that are difficult to teach and even harder to quantify in any meaningful way except by results. I'd have thought it silly and self-deprecating enough already that people would not mistake it for skygod attitude. Silly me.
Speaking of results, you say my performance appears substandard to you... for awhile that run you mention was not only the #3 longest freefall ever recorded behind Toby and Helmuts records, but that one competition put me in the top 5 stats in two of three disciplines and made me the only pilot in a suit as weak as an S-bird to do so, a distinction that last I checked, I still hold... beating a bunch of records set by others flying XBirds and Apaches in the process. Although I have recently been unseated from top5 time by some newer results, I remain the #5 distance record and still the only top 5 competitor to take an S that far. In what way is this substandard? Do I have to actually take a #1 spot to be judged proficient?
And lastly, aside from the radical altimeter results, which I have every reason to believe I can reproduce at will, Ive only just started using a flysight of my own, still figuring out how to get clean tracks, (using it without a lock on the ground first doesnt seem to work) gimme a bit to collect a bunch of data before you jump to scorn me willya? Jeez.
-B
Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

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Lurch, keeping your FS battery fully charged helps a lot to get better satellite fixes.

What I usually do is turn FS on for about 15 minutes when I get to the DZ then turn it on again 5 minutes before exiting the aircraft.

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you say my performance appears substandard to you...



No I didn't, actually I think your performance is quite good and probably far better than I could achieve. It just didn't match up to the impression I had from reading various posts of yours. I guess the whole point was that nice flowery talk is all well and good, but it's only hard data that can be objectively compared. Not a dig at you at all.

There is very little to do with Flysight other than what is stated in the quick start guide. Turn it on for 15min at the start of the day, and 1min before boarding, but it will probably work even if you don't do that.

The accuracy of the data, num of stats etc is all recorded in log file, so there should be no problem uploading the existing file. If you post the raw file people will be able to see if it's a good dataset or not.

That aside, there were a few other specific questions in my post above that you could answer without the data.

I'm not out to scorn you, just put some context on statements that seem too good to be true. Is that so unreasonable?

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radical altimeter results



Slightly off-topic. But using a flare, I get reading off the flysight that indicate +- 10 mph fallrates, that on the AltiTrack show +- 20 mph climbs.

I think thats mostly due to the fact that during a flare, there is a high pressure region under my body (chest mounted alti) that gives the device a higher (thus lower altitude) reading than the actual one. As the flare bleeds off, the pressure goes back to normal..thus having the 'climb' a few ft.

All results of climbing so far, have a reasonable error-margin either due to air pressure in normal altimeters, or the 1G acceleration model on GPS units.

As fun as all these readings are...the margin of error on all devices saves me from quoting these readings as the absolute truth, but more-so...indicating its only 'close', untill we get more accurate means of measurement.
JC
FlyLikeBrick
I'm an Athlete?

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Thanks Drunk... I'm not sure how charged it was, nor was I using it right. I tossed it into my wing as an afterthought and fired it up in the plane hoping it'd get something interesting. My focus was simply having a flight or three not making sure I followed the correct operation procedure for the widget.

I don't have paralog yet and the available free flysight viewer doesn't seem to do anything useful beyond a couple graphs and a google earth overlay.
The first two runs were clearly garbage on the fallrate graph...huge spiky graphs that made no sense.

The third run I'm calling a climb, makes a bit more sense and after staring at it for awhile it sort of resembles the behavior in the jump as dived, but doesn't match known similar circumstances and the details it recorded make as little sense as a climb or the lack of it do. For example it does show a big steady buildup in speed as I was staying with Skwrl... however it is a single steep slope up to over 100 mph fallrate, with a brief stop in the 40mph range and Skwrl, (in his Sbird for that one) although fatigued, would have had to be diving limp and headdown to force me up to 100 staying with him. Horizontal speed at that point peaks at 148.3mph (238.7 KPH) which I'm also taking with a big grain of salt, I seriously doubt I was going THAT fast chasing a tired S-bird.

Lowest fallrate at the bottom of the flare shows as 17.5mph which isn't unreasonable, if slightly disappointing, but would be less disappointing if I thought that 17 was any more accurate than the rest.

Lastly, the Altitude display DOES show a solid, clear climb. A small one only. The altitude graph is a single solid line down from about 14,000 feet with one zigzag in it showing a sudden stop at 6294 feet, a popup to 6336 feet and a resumption of descent after that. I did not pull until quite some time later which does show clearly. If I felt like smacking Luke for being obnoxious I could crow about this as proof except I doubt that little climb as much as I doubt the fallrate graph because they don't match. It means the numbers the GPS derived or the program is displaying don't even agree with themselves. The altitude graph shows me ascending slightly at the same moment another graph of the same dive shows a 17.5mph fallrate. One or the other number is bogus or the program is doing a piss poor job of interpreting and displaying it. But the bottom line is there looks to be an inaccuracy in the only half-clear run I've got thats at least 15-25 mph wide or else the program is ignoring certain data and making it worse.

Either way I'll put up some decent runs on PPC when I have some actual decent runs to put up. My focus was getting to know the suit, not producing engineering data to satisfy the petulant heckling of nitpicking netsurfers demanding that I throw down proof to their satisfaction before my fucking underwear has even dried from the LAST flight.

Anyway I'm going to simply keep collecting em, next few runs I'm going to follow the quickstart procedure properly including a solid ground bootup and see if I can repeat and improve on what this thing gets, see if the results make a little more sense, maybe buy a copy of paralog.

-B
Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

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if the results make a little more sense, maybe buy a copy of paralog.


You don't need to buy paralog. The only restriction of free version of paralog is that you can't keep logbook. Just download and use it.
Also you can simply email me your your tracks in NMEA format to [email protected] (I can't force my paralog to read GPX format) and I will try to cut it in proper way and forward you printscreens of paralog analys. I will not share it by myself or discuss it with anybody. You will share it by yourself if you want.
I'm going to order X3, which is airplane version of Rebel, that's the reason of my interest.

P.S. Sry for poor english.

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