On Sunday, August 9, 2015 at 7:45:17 AM UTC-4, Andy Blackburn wrote:
True. In Stealth mode you also won't get speed, track and climb rate info and the altitude will be dithered. That makes it hard for your display device to do anything other than 1mi / 1000 ft traffic alerts - which is what LX does with Stealth off anyway.

I'll have to look up whether collision alarms are calculated and passed to the serial port some how for high closing rate threats outside the 2km limit for stealth target blanking. Even if that's teue it's not at all clear that an alarm would come with any traffic display, since no exceptions are mentioned in the spec for blanking this info outside 2km and not every target on a reciprocal heading generates a collision warning sonita possible for converging traffic to get down to 2km and change course towards you. Flarm extrapolates, but it doesn't anticipate maneuvering. My setup is 8-12 km for head-on, so normally I'd pick up a potential threat a lot further out from a visual scan, voice annunciation not withstanding. I think of gliders making a 180 at a turnpoint as a classic scenario. They're invisible, then they're 10+ seconds away and you have an alarm (but maybe not a target on the display until they close within 2km?).

9B

Working to stem the tide of technology seems a bit like tilting at windmills. While mandating Stealth buys a bit more time for the "good old days" (a few years) as 9B has pointed out once ADSB happens it nullifies stealth.

Allowance of other electronics (i.e. smartphone/tablet based) makes stealth just the tip of the iceberg.

Maybe a good use of our intellectual effort is to ponder how to sharply reduce the competitive advantage of Flarm (or visual) leeching.

Perhaps the "latest start time" concept advanced by BB has use here? You can start late and use technology to catch up, but you pay a price for it.

9B's "leach tax" concept may have utility here also.

So I am advocating spending more time thinking about how to change the task to sharply decrease the utility of Flarm leeching rather than just debating stealth/nostealth, which seems to me is a relatively short-term instance of the the overall challenge.

QT