Spike

Gus, if you want someone in the UK, I used these people and was very pleased with the service/quality etc. but you may get a better price elsewhere??? For a 100metre roll Eddie Prentice of TRS Ribbons quoted me:- I went for the cheapo deal, pleased with the quality of the ribbon and the printing.

What Mat said. Cheer up, not long and your gonna be over here having a parteeeeee

Hi Vicki, You gonna save me a dance at the AGM? I'll be wearing my dancin' shoes this year

Likewise, I wish I'd gone on a canopy control course way way sooner than I did. FJC pays far too little attention to canopy skills imho. You simulate, exits, posture, dummy pulls and emergency procedures, like there's no tomorrow. But canopy control is like an afterthought. Your BI tells you... pull the left toggle to turn left, the right... and when your about head high, pull both in about the time it takes to say Flare, and don't worry, you'll here me on the radio, do exactly what I say and you'll land fine... maybe some stuff about plf's... and thats it. I guess we don't "simulate" canopy flights because technically its hard to do. At Langar when I did my fjc they had a fan trainer, you were hooked up into a harness on a 20ft frame. You jumped off and it lowered you forwards and down, pretty much like a normal round canopy descent. Now its not a perfect simulation and only shows you the last 20ft, but at least you had "some" idea of what was coming. But I've not seen a fan trainer anywhere else and I've met a fair few novice jumpers who look confused when you say plf. As I say canopy control, the cinderalla of fjc. Oops... sorry, but there is way more to flying canopies than most people know. Find the crw dogs at your dz and talk to them. These are the guys that know how to do survival stuff really really well. They can fly forward like the average joe, but they know the cool stuff like flying sideways, backwards, sinking etc... I'm not a crw dog, but they have my full respect. [/rant off] and I think a downplane taken to the basement looks every bit as cool as a swoop.

Yep, just to second that. Rapidly pulling one toggle down and then quickly following by pulling the other toggle down is NOT the correct way to initiate a flat turn. Doing this will induce pendulum and instability close to the ground. You start a flat turn from straight flight in medium brakes. So if your in full glide before you can start a flat turn you have to go to brakes on both toggles.

Scott Miller will put you through this if you take one of his canopy control courses. Though he's doing it as part of an excercise in finding, passing through and recovering from the stall point. Usefull for exploring the performance range of your canopy. But as a byproduct, you learn how to fly backwards. You try this way high and pull the toggles down until you find the stall point and then you keep on holding the toggles there. If you pull a little more down then as Terry said the tail will pull round and depending upon the canopy will eventually form a (funny) round or the sides of the tail will keep on fight for dominance. Either way you stop going forward and relative to the ground you start going backwards and down (majorly). It feels VERY scary, especially if your looking up watching yourself turn a perfectly good canopy into something that looks very like a bag of washing. Thoughts like "why am I doing this?" ran through my head. Scott drums it into you (and this is very important) that the trick for recovery is to stay very calm and when your done playing, let the toggles back up sloooooowly. If you just whip the toggles up then the canopy will dive and whip you round. At best you'll get a huge number of line twists, at worst the canopy will collapse underneath you! Looks wierd from the ground too. I've not seen it done, but I recall it being said that the way to loop the loop under canopy was from very deep brakes. And remember talk to your coach/mentor before you do this and always do it high.

Hey Alana, room on your list for one more? Weather here is a "crisp" 5 deg C, clear blue skies and nil winds. Though the last couple of days have seen more rain than all summer. Next weekend I'm at the Headcorn Chrimbo party, week before I was at Hinton, week before that I was at Nethers. Its all good.

I'm not an Aussie, but I did spend a year out there touring the country a while back. There are two national chains Ted's Camera Shop and The Camera House with branches in the Sydney CBD. My recollection was that Ted's was the better value of the two and was staffed by "enthusiasts" who knew there stuff. I bought a camera from Ted's and was very pleased with the deal. How's this though. You travel 10,000 miles to be sold a camera by a guy who used to live less than 100 miles from your home town! But I also bought a used minolta with a 28-90 zoom lens from Ca$h Converters in Brisbane. Its old as the hills and rough looking. But it was only AU$40 including 3 rolls of film and it still works today. Whats more, as it was so cheap I've been happy to take it into non camera friendly environments rafting, caving, climbing, sandboarding.... and got some great pictures. Yes it stopped working, but being "old technology" I was able to take it to pieces, use the s/o's mascara brushes and dust the sand out. Works as good as gold and is optically great. Best AU$40 I've ever spent.

Hey Nick, Cool, I knew you'd have a ball, that knee flying is a blast. I got a freeflyer to vid me kneeflying all the way down when I got back to real air - coooooool and unusual footage, for a bellyflyer. I'm so pleased you had a good time, I know how important it is to Thomas and the rest of the XL guys, to hear that people benefited from thier skill and experience. Yes I'm definitely up for a camp in '04. There are a couple of other peeps who said they would be interested too, so lets work it out. I'll PM you. Gosh man, you just took me back down memory lane, its been tooooo long since I've been in the tunnel. Love verts. Did you play posit, chasing Thomas round the tunnel?

At a bridge I took a tour of, the guides tell a story about its construction. One of the steel erectors back in the 1920's fell from near the top, 130 metres above sea level and survived. The story goes that as he fell, rivets tumbled from a bag he was carrying and broke the surface tension of the water. While he did survive he suffered fractures in both legs. edit: Please read the "Before you Post" link in the upper right hand corner. ~Tom Aiello Sorry Tom, I didn't make the connection between my post, the forum rules and this place being potentially active.

I've bought at least a dozen CD's from separate artists, because of tracks I've heard on jump videos. I've been to a couple of DZ's where the videographer gives the TM passenger the option of using thier own music. So presumably if they own the CD and the video is for thier own use, then its OK? Anyone know? But what if you/they show video in public, like on a tv in the TM assembly area or a packing shed or the bar at the end of the day? My experience is that getting permission is way too hard. I've written to a couple of the music companies here in the UK. No reply. Try phoning and you end up being passed around dozens of people till they figure out your making a "film". Then when the girl/guy who does movie licencing realizes your not talking about multi million £/$ volumes, suddenly your talking to yourself.

Hi Mish, I haven't been in the tunnel at Paris, but Thomas Hughes of Sebastian XL (the UK national team) has coached in both so he could give an opinion. You could PM him and there are some threads on here from people who have been to the Paris tunnel. What I do know though is that converting US$ and Euros to GBP£, a minute in Orlando costs £1.40 and a minute in Paris costs £3.45! Including flights & taxi to Orlando v ferry + petrol to drive to Paris from London, we worked out that if we did more than 3 hours 15 minutes in the tunnel then Orlando works out cheaper. Also, Skyventure, you book your time say 1 hour from 2pm-3pm. In Paris you book your hour, arrive at opening time and the operators fit your hour in piece by piece over the day as it suits them, so it might take all day to do your hour. Makes briefing/debriefing interesting. The Paris tunnel isn't wall to wall air, so for low timers if you can't stay stable in the flow, you fall off the column. On the positive side, I've been told there is a lot more room than at Orlando. Though I've done 4 way in Orlando and didn't find it too small, though I'm in junior league so don't do that many block moves. Wherever you go tunnel, your going to have a ball, not jealous at all.

Hey Nick, Your going to have an fabulous time, start stretching now. Camps with XL early next year are on my agenda too and I have a couple of other guys planning on hooking up too. Let me know if your interested and we'll work it out. You lucky lucky person.

Rather a long post, but this is a copy of an article I wrote for Skydive The Mag last year after my first camp with XL. I've a few more jumps now and a bit more time in the tunnel, but the article still reflects the enthusiasm I have for XL and the coaching they give. At least two of the XLites (John Keogh and the lovely Emma), went on to win Gold at the British Nationals this year as part of V2. Edited for bad use of brackets

Hey Thomas, Shameless dude, just shameless.

Hi Phil, Go for as much time as you can afford. I've done 2 hours in two days and while I picked up some bruises and yeah I was tired, I never got to the point where I thought I was wasting my money. In fact if the slots had been available I'd have done more. I found the tunnel to be really addictive and I've been back again and again and..... The tunnel is awesome, not skydiving, but as a learning tool and fun factor its simply awesome. Start stretching now, every day, and make sure you stretch before and after your sessions in the tunnel. And yes coaching makes a big difference. Figure out what you want to learn/improve/focus on and go through it with your coach before you get in the tunnel to maximise the benefit. Expect to have a face ache, your gonna be smiling wider than a wide mouthed frog.

Hi PollyX It depends If your tv or vcr is modern you will probably be able to view the footage. Lots of tvs and vcrs in the UK actually have a label which says NTSC playback. However, that means exactly that, playback only. You cannot record use your NTSC playback vcr to satisfactorily record the NTSC footage from your PC101 onto a VHS tape. This is because the vcr uses a special NTSC4.43 output signal standard to fool PAL tvs into displaying an Ok image. But this isn't good enough for recording with. Ditto if you pop the PC101 (NTSC) tape into a PAL camcorder and use that to playback. While the image will be good enough to view on a tv, it won't be good enough to record onto a vcr. Why do you want to buy an NTSC camcorder?

Glad to help If you try it out as shareware, it puts a watermark in the middle of the screen which says "unregistered" or somesuch, but at least you get to see if the quality is any good for you. Make sure you do a couple of conversions and compare motion interpolation with 2:3:2:2 pulldown, which is best depends on the footage imho. I'm told, but haven't tried for myself, that the watermark is only in the first few frames, so if you can edit those out... The website says that it takes a couple of days to register, but the chap who runs it sent me my key in under 2 hours, he's really helpfull with advice, so its probably worth the fee to support the guy. Happy jumpin'

Wait till you visit the states, they're about 1/2 UK price, and yes they will sell you a PAL version that can DV in AND out, as long as you tell them thats what you want. I bought my PC101e in Florida, price in UK duty free £985, price in Florida $795.

If you want a digital solution you could try the shareware here. I use it to go NTSC/PAL, but it works both ways, it gives perfect colour and frames per second conversion, though sometimes high speed motion can be a little blury, but when transfering to VHS tapes I don't find the quality particularly compromised. You need to firewire/IEE1394 into your pc and then use the software to convert it. You can then edit it and burn it onto your DVD or firewire it back to your camera on a new DV tape. Firewireing from a PAL camera to an NTSC camera (or vice versa) does not do standards conversion, whoever told you that was wrong. The TV standard (PAL or NTSC) that the footage was originally encoded in is retained in the digital file.

Hi Big G, Two ways to do this, either buy a TV/VCR which is multi standard, I never came across one while I was in the US, but I see you've been give a link to a Samsung which will do this. Another way is to pop your DV tape out of your PAL camera and into an NTSC camera. This will then playback onto an NTSC TV, but note that while the picture is good for TV its not a good enough signal for recording onto VHS.

It was, mistaking you for someone else! and yes cool sig...

Hi Tim, Thanks for the insider info, leaving the metalwork in is what the surgeon suggested. Taking it out is what the physio said. Yeah, my break wasn't sexy either. Normal flare, glide and took a couple of steps on landing. But I on the way through I caught the foot in a tuffet of grass, kicked up some dust and twisted the foot to/beyond the limit. It was my fault that I slightly changed my run in at the last minute and I came in faster/lower than normal, but we are talking about fractions here. Before now I've hit the dirt hard, bounced, rolled and still got up with just bruises to my pride. Waiting till I got a good range of movement in the ankle was my idea too. With the current rate of improvement I was expecting that to be in a month or so. I'm just expressing my dissapointment/shock at how long the physios said I should wait at this mornings consultation. In short I guess I'm going to keep doing the physio/excercises/stretches and wait well into the new year before pulling a rig over my shoulders again. Thanks to you and your good lady for the advice. Nice to have some educated input on what might happen if I do stoof in again. Happy jumping.

Hey Kramer, Thanks for the input, I used to think I was a patient person, but I'm seeing some folks who run me out a long way. I suppose patience is free. And how did you make a 24 point 4way after 2 years! I didn't turn that many points in a 3 on 1 with XL!!!

Hi Dave, The conversation went... Skydiving, 6 to +12 months. I said so what can I do in the meantime? They ruled out anything which involves habitual impact, like soccer, skiing, snowboarding, moutain biking, even running. They then went on to suggest that sports which could result in accidental impacts like rock climbing, or surfing were bad too. Its then that I began to think, well maybe they have a different attitude to risk, rather than the actual risk of further injury being so high? Its like I don't want to stuff myself up by starting too soon. But they are the professionals who should know this stuff, but a year+ honestly. Seems like walking, cards and chess are in the "safe" zone. Ummm, I used to think I had a life.