Gerhard,
fully agree with you, but would like to add one situation where
FLARM is useful. When there is someone on your under or
above, in position where you cannot see the other plane, flying
into the same direction. Can be cloudstreet, competition or just
a friend of your's you fly with.
The LED based FLARM displays used in Europa can only show
one target. If there are several planes around you, this display
does not give you very good situation awareness. That caused
here a midair of two FLARM equipped gliders year ago.
The powerflarm has graphical display, that shows several
targets around you. It also has two receivers and antennas, so
the situation of the midair I mentioned should not occur again.
There was no FLARM warning - looks like the carbon fuselages
dampen the radio signal, and the gliders approached each
others from the dipole antenna's blind spots.
-kimmo

(English language summary on page VII)
http://www.turvallisuustutkinta.fi/Satellite?
blobtable=MungoBlobs&blobcol=urldata&SSURIapptype= BlobSer
ver&SSURIcontainer=Default&SSURIsession=false&blob key=id&
blobheadervalue1=inline;%20filename=Tutkintaselost us%20B1_
2011L.pdf&SSURIsscontext=Satellite%20Server&blobwh ere=134
2016078074&blobheadername1=Content-
Disposition&ssbinary=true&blobheader=application/pdf

At 15:06 30 October 2012, wrote:
Don,

I fully agree that maintaining a good lookout at all times
is a good basis for see-and-avoid.

However, we believe that even the best pilot may occasionally
fail to
detect traffic.
There are a number of human factors which affect perception
(distraction, selective attention, target merging into
background, target
not
moving wrt. background, etc).

We have a presentation where on one slide we listed the
situations where
FLARM
has potentially better and/or earlier chances to detect traffic
than the
human eye.

These situations a
- Head-on and converging course (both gliders in cruise),
especially in the
presence of clouds, snow fields etc.
- One glider circling, another one approaching the same
thermal.
- Two gliders circling in opposite directions (yes, we know this
shouldn't
happen...)

As you say, the fewer gliders in a thermal, the more helpful
FLARM can be.

FLARM does help in wave, but the indicated relative bearing to
the threat
may be strongly biased by wind.

Needless to say, whenever a FLARM warning occurs, the pilot
should
immediately
try to make visual contact with the threat.

In the Classic FLARM manual, we write:

"Under no circumstances should a pilot or crewmember adopt
different
tactics or deviate from the normal principles of safe
airmanship."

I think that summarizes it quite nicely.

Best
--Gerhard