Basejumper.com - archive

what is your opinion about using cheap homemade vented rain paints + cheap rain jacket for tracking in comparison to a track suit made by company such as phoenix fly???

Performance wise how much more horizontal distance will you get from a track suit??? Or is it a 'cool factor' that you're paying for???

Its a financial issue for me...I think I am going to make the rain paints+rain jacket and try them out (skydiving) and maybe just go with those instead of the pricier track suits.

Anybody done comparison???

I have not jumped a tracking suit, but even the not so cheap (Gander Mountain brand) rain suits don't last well if you take them to terminal. They beat themselves apart. And if you do have a less than gentle landing, they tend to tear relatively easily.

I looked at a Phoenix Fly tracking suit last year and it was made of MUCH heavier material than my rain suit. Now if you are talking about an Offshore sailing rain suit, that may not be the case, but then you can buy a tracking suit for not much more than a really good sailing rain suit.

High end modern suits (like the PF) suit are going to get better tracking performance.

But given that you can get 75% of that performance for a tenth of the price, if you are on a budget, it makes a lot of sense to make a smoking suit of your own.

I'd recommend using something as well built as possible and skydiving it a bit to make sure it's solid. I know of two cases in which an experienced jumper built some home made tracking pants this way and didn't do a test skydive, and then experienced a failure on the first (BASE) jump. In one case a leg seam blew out and one leg deflated, causing a flat spin next to a terminal tower. In the other, the belt failed and the jumper ended up with the pants around his knees 4 seconds down a terminal wall. Both could have been really bad situations, but thankfully in both cases the jumpers were able to save themselves from injury.

for some reason this reminds me of using modified skydiving gear for base.... a raven may also gives you 75% of performance for a fraction of what a new base canopy would cost...

for all E tracking jumps everyone will agree that the further away from the object you open, the better. therefore if you save money by not getting proper tracking equipment, you are selling your safety margin.

you can get a used tracksuit for less than 200 bucks, so i see really no reason to not go with the "real" shit.

It's really a question of what your minimum requirements are, and what your budget is.

If we were all to have the best gear all the time, regardless of cost, we'd want to replace all our PC's with Toxics and replace our rigs every 100 jumps. In the real world, we make decisions about cost based on the performance we want to purchase.

For some people paying $200 for a tracking suit isn't a big deal. For some it is. Everyone will have to make their own decisions based on their own requirements and finances.


It makes little sense to pay for a tracking suit if you are too cheap to practice with it, though. Training is almost always going to be a better investment than the latest greatest gear. Put a fat American like me in a $500 tracking suit and a fit European mountain tracker is going to beat me very time, even if he only has a $20 smoking suit.

In the context of this discussion, the new jumper with only $200 is going to be better served to get a $20 tracking suit and $180 worth of jump tickets to practice, rather than buying the $200 tracking suit and heading straight out to a tower to figure things out there.

I think that there are a lot of new jumpers who think "if I just throw down a credit card for a $4000 rig with all the bells and whistles, and then buy a top end wing suit, I'll be flying just like those guys I see on Youtube." Saving money on the gear and putting your effort toward training makes a lot more sense, because skill trumps gear 99% of the time.

plus, if others are happy jumping without a tracking suit, then wearing a home made one will increase their margin.

it will permit a jumper a taste to see if they want to pursue it further.

that makes sense to me. I would think once I start to jump terminal objects using homemade track pants (after practicing them skydiving), then I'd want to still be choosing objects that I could jump in regular clothes safely. This way then I would have increased the safety margin beyond what I would minimally accept as 'do-able'.*

I would not want (immediately or maybe ever) to start to play the game of using a track suit to clear ledges that I couldnt clear using regular clothes.

Thanks for the comments, Tom, and everybody else.

* That is assuming that I can accurately assess objects and jumps and determine my safety margin with the help of more experienced folks

Have a look at these:
http://nitrorigging.com/...pment/tracking-pants

Booties :)

300 for pants

I hope they are really much better....but how can you quibble with performance improvements I guess if you are trying to push the envelope??? I suppose I wouldnt be trying to push the envelope performance wise so hard that I would need to spend 300 dollars on pants...I'd rather spend it to help buy a plane ticket to a site around the world to jump, or spend it on other necessary gear, or jump tickets out of a plane...but I understand that people have a lot more disposable income than I do