Darryl Ramm wrote:
Oh doh, thank you Mr. Governor. OK there is a basis to the claim, but
definitely not because of differences "pinging". 0440 is just two
pulses (binary 4 twice). And 1200 (binary 1 and 2) also has two
pulses, and there are always two framing pulses, and maybe an ident
pulse. So 1200 and 0440 should be no different in terms of radiated
power. And usually every second interrogation/response is going to be
an altitude code. So I guess they could pick a worse code and have
several more pulses (would have to look at the map of available codes
to see how bad it could be, luckily 7xxx is taken :-)) I'd be curious
to see actual differences in power consumption measurements.

Uh, no Mr. Boffin, tis not quite that simple. It's been a while since I
looked at this stuff, but I believe the actual transponder code is
encoded using a modified Gray code (as is the altitude code), so the
actual duty cycle is not quite that obvious. Second, the fashion in
which the transponder code and the altitude code are transmitted differ
significantly, as the transponder code portion of the transmission dates
back to WW II IFF, and the Mode C stuff came much later. I doubt the
NTSB would have brought it up, unless there was something to it.
Personally, I'm not interested enough to try to figure it out...

Marc