Basejumper.com - archive

If you were worried about uploading your Yosemite jumps on Skyderby:

Open your .CVS track from Flysight in Excel. Type any random number (like 12.34) in a free cell, Copy that cell (as in cut'n'paste, Ctrl-C), then select your Longitude column cells (not entire column, only non-empty cells!), click on Home, Paste Special, Add. Finally, delete your random number, and save your file.

You now have the same track shifted thousands of miles away by the random coordinates you've typed in, ready to upload on Skyderby or share elsewhere.

https://skyderby.ru/tracks/44259

Important note: if you also change Latitude coordinates, your distance flown will change accordingly, making the track useless. One more reason for a built-in anonymizer at Skyderby upgrade!

bsbd! Yuri.

A nice, easy solution. Thanks for sharing. Do you find, nowadays, that there is widespread concern about secrecy of exit points?

One shortcoming of this method is that your latitude obviously doesn't change, and that could be a big clue if it correlates with a well-known, illegal landmark. Especially if your flight path fits a recognizable pattern.

If anyone is concerned about this latitude being preserved, I made a spreadsheet several years ago that addresses it. You can put in any new starting latitude, longitude, and altitude, and the spreadsheet automatically calculates new waypoints at accurate distances and bearings. One thing I didn't bother to add was a "rotate" feature but that would be pretty simple if anyone were to ask for it.

PM me for a copy of the spreadsheet.

Or use a site that's designed for BASE jumping and private by default.

Dude, you missed the point entirely! I use Baseline on my phone to save laser profiles via Bluetooth, but that's all it's good for - and it gives those top secret coordinates to the site admin .

We are talking about public tracks & flight profiles functionality, that does not exist on Baseline:

https://skyderby.ru/tracks

https://skyderby.ru/...s/25/flight_profiles

When you want your tracks private (or just unlisted), you mark them as such on Skyderby - this is, unfortunately, what many if not most people do anyway and this is what we're trying to change.

bsbd! Yuri.

It sounds like there is a lot of demand for secrecy then.

Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to add an alternative besides marking a track "private." You could mark the track "please obfuscate" and it will select a generic starting location, and then add or subtract a random (small) number of meters to the initial altitude, and recalculate the waypoints and bearings.

Skyderby is great for competitions, both specific events and for the start data competitions. I'm glad it exists, because my interest is not competition but purely on the data analysis.

The point I was trying to make is that I put a lot of thought into making the site work for BASE jumping specifically, and what data to expose or not. For me that means keeping things private by default. People can share BASEline links if they want, but it was an intentional choice to not have a page for "everyone's (public) tracks". It takes about 2 minutes on skyderby to find illegal jumps, jumps during quarantine, etc. Not a good look for BASE jumpers.

Your spreadsheet is cool, but its a hack to work around what is a bad design choice in my opinion. I agree that if you're going to have public tracks, anonymizing them should be an option.

Dude, this post is about public sharing of obfuscated tracks that would otherwise remain private.

Coming out to promote a site that doesn't have a functionality of public track sharing is entirely off-topic.

The topic of this post is not a hack or a work-around: it gives users the 4th option (Obfuscated) in addition to Private, Unlisted or Public that are currently available when uploading a track to Skyderby. To make it easier to understand: you only have 1 option on Baseline, Private tracks, which makes it useless for me or anybody who needs to compare multiple tracks from multiple people. It will be much nicer to have the Obfuscated option built-in, i hear this might be done in the next release of Skyderby. If you add this option and public track-sharing in general (at user's choice of course!) to Baseline, it will become a very useful site - see the screenshot attached as an example of what's needed. At the moment, there's nothing i could do with Baseline that i don't already have on Skyderby. The only feature that keeps Baseline on my phone is Bluetooth laser pairing, for which i am very, very grateful - and so i'm sure are Baseline admins when they get realtime top-secret exit data synched online...

P.S. vast majority of the flights made worldwide are legal and public, and so are most of the wingsuit and tracking sites. Thinking of alpine BASE as inherently illegal is soooo nineties mentality, right there with Beavis & Butthead

bsbd! Yuri.

Genuinely asking: in what situation is it useful to compare your profile to others at the same site? In BASE jumping you're trying to outfly the cliff, not your friends.

It would not be a difficult feature to implement, but my thinking is that what matters is YOUR performance in your own suits. That's why in the BASEline Profiles it is possible to compare your own flights in different suits against a known cliff profile:



Totally welcome suggestions, I'm always trying to make BASEline better. But I want to focus on things that really help to make individuals safer and able to jump more things. From my experience, the most valuable things are:

• understanding your own start numbers, glide performance, etc.


• measuring cliffs so that you can compare to your own start numbers and decide if its within your margin.


• being able to evaluate potential sites (eg- relocate a track from brento to a new object to see if you'll make the landing)


• the polar chart for understanding the real flight envelope of your suits (also super useful for flare training).

Skyderby: competition, fun, socialization, bragging rights, opening one's eyes to new possibilities, general data).

BASEline is just a different tool for a different job. Do we need another front in the gear wars?

I think discussing pros and cons of different features is not a gear war. I support skyderby and have messaged a bunch with Aleksandr. I am in favor of having more tools than less.

The question of public tracks or not is one of the central differences, is relevant to this thread, and I think it's interesting to hear what the community thinks. Site naming used to get you banned from here, but mods tell me that's so 90s

Ok, I agree with how you put it. Perhaps I mis-perceived some back-and-forth skepticism, and that seemed regrettable since they are both really awesome tools.

One thing I would like both tools to address, is that I suck at tracking. Could you guys please release a patch for that? Thanks

I think it could be even easier: instead of moving coordinates, it can just remove the Google Maps panel and left it visible only for the uploader. I don't think it would be difficult for Aleksandr and there is no risk that an hacker would violate the site just to rip the exit points :)

I agree with Colm. Different tools for different applications. Skyderby is mostly about people comparing to each other, where BASEline is mostly about tracking personal improvement. Both are useful tools--just for different things.

There's no real advantage to anyone in making them more similar to each other. And since I'm fairly certain they're both hobby (non-commercial) tools (at least I know that BASEline is), there's no need to 'fight' each other for users.

FWIW, I know both platypii and outrager well enough to say that I bet they'd actually really get along in person.

Kenny, do you actually _want_ to have public comparisons of tracks (obfuscated or not) on BASEline? I don't really see what the point would be, since there is already a place on-line for people to have friendly competitions like that.

Full disclosure; I have used BASEline a fair amount, and I've only ever browsed through Skyderby looking for people I know. I'm way too old to compete with anyone but myself.

Come on, why do something easy when you can make it complicated?

I did not read all the comments very carfully but if you put your track in private it is still getting listed in the exit list ?
Sorry if it has been already said somewhere.

I've never tried it but I think it won't be listed.

I think that the problem here is that somebody wants to show his performances (for example to compare different suits) but doesn't want to share the exit. So, if he uploads the track as private, nobody could check the data and his assumption.