On Friday, May 24, 2013 8:08:59 AM UTC-4, Evan Ludeman wrote:
My experience last season was that flarm was a bit of a nuisance:
in large gaggles the darned thing made more noise than my audio vario.
As well, I found the "radar" tracking feature a useless distraction.
So I thought I would fly a contest with Stealth mode enabled by default
as well as Competition mode (higher alarm thresholds, enabled using the
cflags command in the configuration file, see the dataport specification
for details).

It all worked as intended. Warning threshold is "just right" for
competition use and overall distraction level is happily low.

The fraction of pilots at this contest using Flarm was happily high.
I heard "Thanks Flarm!" and similar on the radio many times.

Evan, most likely the reason you had a high alert last season
was a number of gliders did not configure PowerFLARM as aircraft
type GLIDER, but left it at the default POWERPLANE. This gives a
different expectation of required separation and likely trajectories,
and consequently LOTS of alarms.

We still have one or two out there. If you always get an alert around
a specific glider (whose flying is shall we say not a problem), this
is likely the problem. Try to track these down and get it corrected !

Stealth: NOT RECOMMENDED.

Competition Mode: Should not be required unless pilots are flying
pretty aggressively. YMMV.

Hope that helps,
Best Regards, Dave