I have had the Garmin 330 mode S transponder in my Sundowner for a
year now. I imagine it sure qualifies as a 'Spamcan'!

The 330 is super coupled to the Garmin 430. How, or if, it would play
with other MFDs I don't know.

I'm in the NY Metro area so there is a lot of traffic around here. The
330 has performed flawlessly for me. It is great to know traffic is in
the area before ATC calls it out - if they do. The ability to see the
direction, altitude and altitude trend of the traffic is first class.
The 430 overlays the traffic and also brings up a dedicated alert page
if it detects a possible conflict.

The only drawback I see is that the ground transmitters are not always
in the 'right' place for where I need them. I usually lose the signal
around 2000 feet in the area of KABE - just where I want it most. The
FAA says more transmitter sites are coming, but who knows when.

Your original post asked about the value of Mode S, not the traffic
information system. Mode S alone does virtually nothing for the pilot;
it just records additional info on the ATC tapes. My understanding is
that the controllers don't know you have Mode S and get no additional
data on their scopes.

Jack
Sundowner - N6363U

Roy Smith wrote in message ...
My club has started thinking about putting Mode-S transponders in our
aircraft (3 Archers, 2 Arrows, 2 Bonanzas), to take advantage of traffic
advisory information.

Does anybody here have Mode-S in their plane now? Do you make use of
the traffic info? How well does it work? How easy is it to use? What
do you display the info on?

Is the technology mature enough to invest in today, or do we risk being
on the bleeding edge? One possible route we're thinking of is not
investing wholesale in Mode-S, but waiting for our existing xponders to
die and specify Mode-S in the replacement units.

We're slowly moving towards MFDs in all our planes. Right now, out of 7
planes, we've got one MX-20, one CNX-80, and we're probaby looking at
two more CNX-80's before the summer. How does the traffic info interact
with the other displays? Does it just over-lay the moving map? Do you
need to dedicate a display to traffic?

We've got two schools of thought as to where traffic info would do the
most good, i.e. on a limited budget, which planes do we start equipping
with it first. One school says put it int the Bonanza because it's the
fastest mover. Higher airspeed, less time to see and react to traffic.

On the other hand, the Bonanzas are the most likely to be doing
high-altitude straight line legs from one place to another, so pilot
workload is low most of the time, and ATC is watching (either IFR or VFR
flight following). The Archers are more likely to be low down where
there's lots of traffic, doing training maneuvers without flight
following and where high pilot workload leads to a less effective
traffic scan than most people would care to admit in public.

Any and all thoughts on the subject would be appreciated.