Android Paragliding Instrumentation: XCTrack Configuration

Here is what I have on my XCTrack flight instrument and why. You can download the config file here, move it to /XCTrack/Config on your device then import it in XCTrack (Preferences -> Testing & Debug ->  Import configuration).

The items in bold below are those that I find essential. Everything else is optional or useless.

 Thermalling

Thermal Mode

1. GPS Altitude: The most useful metric for XC in my opinion. I use it to gauge whether I am high enough for crossing valleys / gaps in the terrain.
2. Thermal Gain: Despite the vario beeps, in broken lift it can be hard to tell how the lifty and sinky parts of your turns (or figure 8s when close to terrain / in a lift band) average out. I keep glancing at this number every 30s to gauge whether the lift is so broken that I'm barely maintaining or even slowly sinking out. This is easy to do with just altitude, but not having to remember what height I entered a thermal and to do mental math is a little bit of brain power I can focus elsewhere.
3. Altitude Above Ground Level: Kind of useful when you're closer to landing to know how much airtime you have left when you don't know the ground elevation although you can also eyeball it but it seems like I'm bad at it. You need to download terrain maps for your region for this to work.
4. Ground Speed: Very useful whenever I want to know how strong the wind is. I find using this directly to be more accurate and faster than calculated wind speed which requires you to complete a turn (I believe). Just point into the wind (i.e. no sideways drift), hands up, no bar, and compare to your trim speed. Knowing wind strength is useful for so many reasons including:
• XC tactic: how much headwind you have to fight before committing to a crossing
• turbulence: how much lee-side rotor to expect when close to terrain or coming in to land
• soaring: you can notice small trends of wind going up/down that you might not notice just looking at the terrain.
5. Bearing: I pretty much only use this if I get sucked into a cloud.
6. Wind Speed & Direction: Sadly I could not find any documentation on how (and when) this is calculated but I find it inaccurate often enough to the point where I never look at it. (If someone has some reference or more info I am interested.)
7. Air Time: Good to keep track of how fast/slow the XC route is going, or justify my fatigue level.
8. Distance from Takeoff: Fun metric to know how far I've gone.
9. Altitude above Takeoff: Useful when I'm scratching and feel like I'm going to bomb out, to remind myself that I was able to climb out from much lower and earlier in the day.
10. Airspeed: Useless as far as I can tell since it depends on the unreliably calculated wind speed.
11. Vario Sound Mute: Sometimes nice to turn it off on final glide to just enjoy the scenery or practice acro maneuvers. Only useful if you use the XCTrack acoustic vario. I have just switched to using the sound from my BlueFlyVario which has a physical button to mute.
12. Sensor Connection Status: Not shown in this screenshot but this confirms that the GPS and Bluetooth variometer are connected.
13. Battery Status: When I see this dip below a certain threshold, depending of how long a flight I have a head of me, this lets me turn off the screen and keep my instrument alive and recording.
14. Time of Day: Useful when you expect thermals to die off or wind to switch at a certain time.
15. Thermal Assistant: Incredibly accurate. Very useful when you drop off a thermal.
16. Visual Vario: Very useful to gauge how strong a thermal is. For some reason I cannot tell the difference when my vario beeps at 3 m/s and 5 m/s so I like to just read it off the screen more precisely.

Gliding

Glide Mode

17. Flown XC Distance: Fun to see points and try to optimize when you lack inspiration.
18. Glide Ratio: This fluctuates constantly with your sink rate. When I see it dip below 3 I know my options are limited and when it goes above 8 I don't worry.
19. XC Map: Shows the different legs of your triangle and where to go to extend it. Also a bit of terrain if you're able to zoom in-flight.
20. Visual Vario: Listing this again because it's very useful to know how much sink you're in on a glide and maybe revise your goals, for different reasons than climbing rate optimization.
21. Compass and Wind: For some reason I find the textual compass (bearing) to be easier to use so I never use this. Wind calculation is also often innacurate.