Description

Click here to try the web demo!

Item is currently in pre-production, with units shipping late August.

 

Spoken AGL callouts and a rising flare tone for experimental aircraft — Train your ear. Land it the same — every single time.

 

At its heart it does the thing you already trust: it counts you down. “Three hundred… two hundred… one hundred… fifty… forty…” — clear spoken height above the ground, the same calls the big-iron radar altimeters make, right down through the flare. If that’s all you ever used it for, it’d already be worth the money.

 

But here’s the part nobody else does. Under those numbers, starting from 100 ft (or optionally 200 ft), LidarAGL runs a continuous flare tone — a second, independent channel into the one sense that isn’t already saturated when the runway fills the windscreen.

 

This isn’t a hunch. NASA was studying synthetic-speech height callouts during the landing phase as far back as 1980, and the human-factors work since has kept landing on the same point: the flare is the maneuver pilots rate as harder than nearly any other, and most pilots time it almost entirely on a single visual cue — the runway rushing up in the periphery. Interrupt that one cue with a gust and you’re task-saturated, hunting for visual height information you no longer have. It doesn’t help that general-aviation altimeters can be off by as much as 75 ft AGL, so the instrument you’d reach for can’t reliably answer “how high am I right now?” either. LidarAGL gives your brain a second, independent answer — one you hear instead of hunt for.

 

Fly with it for a few weeks, and the callouts stop being information and start being instinct. You learn its voice — the cadence of the numbers, the frequency of the tone — and your hands start answering before your eyes finish the math. The flare you used to judge on one cue, you now cross-check against two. That’s the whole point: consistency. Not your best landing — every landing, repeatable, because you’ve built the muscle memory with a reference that never reads the runway differently than it did last time.

 

And it’s there in the exact moment the visual cue disappears. Plenty of experimental aircraft flare nose-high — the runway slides up out of the windscreen right when you need it most. That’s when a second channel earns its keep: the lidar never lost the ground, and it’s still counting you down, calm and exact, while you hold the attitude.

 

This product works by using a belly-mounted micro-lidar built around the proven LightWare SF30. It reads your real height above the ground to the inch and turns it into something you hear. One cockpit button sets everything by ear — no app, no laptop, no calibration. It learns its own ground reference at every boot and lives permanently in the panel. Mount it, wire it to your audio panel, power it up, and it’s already listening for the runway.

 

The Audio Is the Product — and It’s Engineered, Not Bolted On

 

The same human-factors literature that flags tone displays as effective also flags the catch: dumb tones fatigue and annoy pilots until they tune them out. So the audio here is built to be lived with.

 

The flare tone rises in pitch as you descend — a rising contour reads as increasing urgency to the human ear without a word being said — and it carries a warm harmonic floor so a continuous presence tone doesn’t turn into an ice-pick after the hundredth landing.

 

Voice callouts are offset to the right channel so speech and tone occupy different spatial and spectral lanes instead of masking each other. None of this is on the $400 pucks, and the $2,000 boxes don’t bother.

 

Configured by One Cockpit Button — No App, No Laptop, No Flashing

 

Hold the button at power-on and tap through everything by ear:

 

   Audio mode — stereo or mono; callouts + tone, callouts only, or tone only.

   Callout start altitude — cap the highest number that speaks.

   Independent tone & voice trims — previewed live as a “mini-flare,” ±6 dB.

   “Check gear” reminder — speaks an altitude then “check gear” on the way down.

   “Positive rate” callout — a confirmed-climb callout after every takeoff (a bounce never triggers it).

   Variometer blip — chops the tone into blips that track your sink (or climb) rate, modeled on a glider vario but mapped for the descent regime: 0 to −1000 fpm instead of the glider’s 0 to +590.

 

Every extra is off by default, saved to NVS, and kept across power cycles. The box auto-detects whether you’ve fitted the 100 m or 200 m lidar, learns its own ground reference at every boot (zero calibration), and even recovers from an in-flight reboot instead of waking up thinking it’s parked.

 

Why LidarAGL

 

A quarter the price, several times the brains. The certified panel-mount height advisors out there run right around $2,000 and only do callouts — no flare tone, no variometer, no stereo psychoacoustics, and on a fraction of the range. This one is $495, permanently panel-integrated, and pipes real audio straight into your headset. Pay four times as much elsewhere and you get less.

 

It makes a tone — they don’t. The app-tethered LIDAR pucks clip to a tie-down ring, run off a rechargeable battery you have to remember to charge, and talk altitudes to your phone over Bluetooth. No flare tone. No variometer. No audio panel. You fly looking at an app. Ours is hard-mounted, line-level into your headset, and gives you the continuous pitch-rising presence tone all the way through the flare — the one cue that actually matters when your eyes are outside.

 

Range and conditions the cheap pucks can’t see through. Fit the 200 m lidar and you’ve got returns long before the short-range pucks wake up. And it’s been flown where reflective ranging usually struggles: over water, and through mist and fog. Not flawless — nothing optical ever is — but it has held a reliable, usable ground return in conditions that routinely drop out a bargain sensor, and the firmware is built to favor a correct late number over a confident wrong one.

 

Zero calibration. Ever. No app to pair, no settings to dial in, no “place it on a level surface and tap calibrate.” LidarAGL learns its own ground reference at every boot and auto-detects which lidar you fitted. Power it up and it’s already zeroed. The strap-on pucks make you set up before every flight — this one you install once and forget.

 

One 2.5″ hole. No screws. No app. The competition wants hardpoints, brackets, straps, a phone in the cockpit, and an A&P for the permanent ones. The Novabox smart threaded housing is its own compression fitting — drill a single 2.5″ hole, drop it in, hand-tighten, done. It lives in the airplane. Nothing to charge, nothing to pair, nothing to forget on the ramp. At only 3 inches tall, it will easily fit anywhere, even on a wing access panel.

 

It’s a system, not a one-trick puck. Voice callouts, an ascending flare tone, a variometer, gear and positive-rate reminders, independent volume trims — every bit tuned by ear from one button, with the kind of psychoacoustic research the $2,000 panel boxes don’t bother with and the bargain pucks can’t touch.

 

Yours to open, read, and modify. Source available. No black box, no locked features behind a paywall. Build it, hack it, make it yours.

 

Receive-only ranging. Non-certified. An advisory height-awareness aid for experimental aircraft and bench use — not a collision-avoidance system, never a substitute for visual flare judgment. A wrong or late callout is worse than silence, which is exactly why the firmware prioritizes correct, on-time numbers over features. By purchasing and/or using this product, you agree to this disclaimer.