Cheap Performance Meter

[EspenW]

i wouldnt say excactly that going to a rolling road will give you accuracy.... none at all actually
Even if the dyno is set up properly you can never get an excact figure as to what the car is doing on the road simply because on 4th gear the velocity and amount of air entering the engine when you are on the road is more than what the fans on a dyno can produce.So you basically are getting less power than what the car is actually making on the road.

Dynos are simply a way to reproduce a result before and after a map or an upgrade.BUT it must be done on the same day and under the same specs given to the dyno program.Otherwise you are doing nothing.

That is positively true. Rolling roads are not made to measure absolute power, they measure differences in power (no matter what shrewd operators might say).
Check out the results from Turbo Magazine's Dyno Dash:
ATW figures varied from 228 to 265 depending on dyno:

http://www.turbomagazine.com/tech/0306tur_turbo_magazine_dyno_dash/index.html

People put way too much faith in dynos.

[Rusty]

Bloody hell! Ordered my GPS receiver yesterday from superetrader (link above) and it arrived this morning! Great stuff! Just getting it setup now so hopefully give it a go this weekend or next week.

[lini]

How long does it take to fix to satelites? Garmin takes 10minutes for the first time but with this I'm waiting for 15 and still no lock. I'm using Samsung SGH 810

[kwlw]

How long does it take to fix to satelites? Garmin takes 10minutes for the first time but with this I'm waiting for 15 and still no lock. I'm using Samsung SGH 810

At first time those modules try to find where they are (I think they are trying to figure out why they aren't in China ). You need to put them outside for about 20min.

After that they somehow update position and next time lock time takes about a minute.

Sau

[A80Avant]

Im going out today with the perfomance box for some measurements...Its a bit windy here but i think i can manage!

[Rusty]

My new Qstarz box gets a fix in a matter of seconds and is rock steady compared to the internal GPS on my N95. I've got to try out the 5Hz option as this is the only realistic way of getting meaningful results.

Vasillis, what Perfomance Box is that? The Racelogic? Be really interesting to see just how much better £350 is than £50...

[Billman]

is there any excel spreadsheet for this one? I found some trackers for my GPS - PDA and would like to give it a try!

[A80Avant]

got some measurements done today,i will post them soon

[Rusty]

I've done it all by hand on Excel, teh formulae are above and just take the data and off you go. For 5 minutes' number crunching I'm happy enough. Best thing is to compare runs for the same car or tyoe of car so that air resistance is somewhere in the same ballpark.

[Billman]

can you maybe put them all together in excel with tips for us not knowing how to use excel appart from tipping numbers?

[Rusty]

When I get some data I'll come up with something to 'guess' at WHP.

[Jonas_R]

Andy:
Can this program be used on a pc? Or do you now a similar program for the PC, would be nice to hook something like this up to the car pc and do some measurements.

[Jonas_R]

Oki did some digging and this program seems to be nice:

www.maxqdata.com they even have DIY version of the software where you can supply your own GPS.
This combined with a 10Hz Wintec G-Rays WBT-300 GPS should get some nice results.

[Rusty]

Andy:
Can this program be used on a pc? Or do you now a similar program for the PC, would be nice to hook something like this up to the car pc and do some measurements.

The racechrono I have is for a mobile, have a look on their website tho.

[Rusty]

Used my Qstarz BT-Q818x today and it works fine with both my N95 and Racechrono. I told my Mum to do a 0-60 and she had a go... when I'd stopped laughing I explained (politely of course) that she might want to practice before trying another one. ANyway, data at 0.2s itervals is obviously much better than before and the Qstarz has a rock solid GPS position too so it looks really good.