Experience with Flarm "Stealth" and Competition modes

On Sunday, May 26, 2013 2:49:39 PM UTC-7, wrote:
My experience with US power flarm radar consists of one contest at Perry, where I hooked my flarm brick to my Clearnav. (Other gliders seem to have disappeared from the Clearnav screen with recent updates, which I hope will be fixed.)



Yes, you can see other gliders and Flarm's idea of their climb rates, at distances of a few miles. In my experience, I was never able to successfully join one of them in a thermal. But I guess the potential is there.



On the other hand, I found the greater situational awareness of the Flarm radar, that would not be provided by collision warnings alone, of great benefit, both for safety and for contest enjoyment.



Pre-start gaggles in misty conditions (start height was not set well below cloudbase) showed up very nicely. It was a great benefit to know there were 10 gliders I couldn't see in the cloud ahead, before the collision warnings started going nuts. Collision warning means look down, see where Flarm thinks the glider is, look up, find the glider, avoid it, try not to run in to another one.



A similar thing happened in cruise. I went one way, another half of the gaggle went another way. 15 miles later I could see on the flarm radar that we were converging again, at exactly the same altitude. I like to think we all look 90 degrees to the left and right frequently enough to pick up gliders converging to the cloud ahead. But it sure was nice to know about it all well before collision warnings started going off.



I found it enjoyable too. I would not have known where the other half of the gaggle went. Seeing where they went and where I went in real time, realizing we made exactly the same speed to the next cloud was interesting. It didn't make any difference to the race, but it's fun to know where people are.



Similarly, on one long leg with no turns, it seemed to me looking out the window that I was completely alone. I would not have known about the 10 gliders just behind me without the Flarm radar. Useful for safety, and interesting if not very valuable in the contest.



I see a strong chance that Flarm radar will lead to a bit less gaggling. Now, if you want to fly with the gaggle, you must stay in visual contact which is quite close. If it works to join other gliders by flarm, you can afford to go off a bit more on your own and not worry you'll be alone all day.



In sum, with this experience, I see flarm radar as possibly having a very slight competitive benefit. It has a slight, but definite, enjoyment benefit. And it has, a substantial safety benefit. Knowing where they are before the collision alarm goes off and I have a Big Problem Right Now is a good thing.



In any case, fear that this is the End Of Soaring As We Know It, that a new generation of techies will take over who just watch screens and leech along like a big video game, seems highly overstated, at least based on my experience with current equipment in this contest.



John Cochrane

As always John is right on. Stealth mode eliminates the increase situational awareness that Flarm provides. Normal mode does not provide much if any benefit in contests. More than half the time I followed a flarm target which appeared to climb well did not pay off and I wish I didnt. Also the climb rate which flarm shows is not compensated nor a good averager. I often see 9.9 knots when the glider is only climbing at 1-2 knots on average. Totally misleading. But it is sure helpful for team flying to know where your buddy is.
Also the original poster claimed that he reduced flarm alerts in gaggles by turning stealth mode. I am not sure how this will be possible. Flarm collision alerts are not suppressed by stealth mode.

Ramy

On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 12:52:20 AM UTC-4, Ramy wrote:

Also the original poster claimed that he reduced flarm alerts in gaggles by turning stealth mode. I am not sure how this will be possible. Flarm collision alerts are not suppressed by stealth mode.

Read it again. Competition mode and stealth mode are two completely different things.

T8

Also the climb rate which flarm shows is not compensated nor a good averager. I often see 9.9 knots when the glider is only climbing at 1-2 knots on average. Totally misleading.

Flarm knows groundspeed which is usually close enough to airspeed to allow a first order TE compensation calculation. I think we should expect Flarm to get that on their To-Do list. Also, Flarm should not pass any number for climb rate until enough integration time has passed that the number has become usefully stable and meaningful (until the reading stabilizes, we should just see two dashes in the display).

Now that all of the basic functions of PowerFlarm are working, this is the time to do refinement. The ability to read a meaningful climb rate for other gliders is potentially a very nice feature. When this is working right, I suspect that folks will be less likely to choose stealth mode.

On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 12:06:45 PM UTC-4, Steve Koerner wrote:
Also the climb rate which flarm shows is not compensated nor a good averager. I often see 9.9 knots when the glider is only climbing at 1-2 knots on average. Totally misleading. Flarm knows groundspeed which is usually close enough to airspeed to allow a first order TE compensation calculation. I think we should expect Flarm to get that on their To-Do list. Also, Flarm should not pass any number for climb rate until enough integration time has passed that the number has become usefully stable and meaningful (until the reading stabilizes, we should just see two dashes in the display). Now that all of the basic functions of PowerFlarm are working, this is the time to do refinement. The ability to read a meaningful climb rate for other gliders is potentially a very nice feature. When this is working right, I suspect that folks will be less likely to choose stealth mode.

So now that Flarm folks have finally provided the deliverables promised, i.e reliable collision avoidance and flight logging, both of which are/were needed, and were the selling points, they should get to work and make it a better leeching tool than it already is, which more than a few of us think we do not need.
Hopefully they will be as slow in that effort as they were on the primary product.
More work will be needed by "someone" to develop a way to get information without giving it. That would be the obvious next step in Flarm Radar wars.
The "situational awareness" argument is simply a canard to get people to buy this device in order to try to remain competitive. Collision avoidance as currently provided, is a good improvement to our safety margins. That is all we really need.
One guy's opinion.
UH

The holy grail of glider technology is the ability to read the strength of thermals at a distance. So far, accomplishing that has evaded all those who have tried. PowerFlarm offers the best hope for doing just that on a limited scale when there are other gliders in a cooperating network. If you want to view that as a leeching tool, so be it. Glider racing is inherently a cooperating process.

There are folks now that are advocating voice cooperation between racers. Certainly the subject PowerFlarm functionality is fairer and more benign than having guys off on a separate frequency discussing strategies.

"Evan Ludeman" wrote in message
...
I flew the Sports Class Nats with Powerflarm Brick (v 3.0), Butterfly 57mm
display (v 3.1).

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 Ludeman / T8


Thanks, Evan, for your review of competition and stealth modes. I would like
to set my PowerFlarms to competition mode, but am unsure how to proceed.

The Data Port Specifications, version 6.00E, page 16, gives a value of
"0x02" to Enable Competition Mode, but the examples immediately below show
integer values. So, is the proper sub-sentence: $PFLAC,S,CFLAGS,0x02 or
$PFLAC,S,CFLAGS,2 or something else?

I am unwilling to experiment because it also says, "If you do not understand
the concept of bit flags, do not use this command!"

It is clear that the sub-sentence for stealth mode is: $PFLAC,S,PRIV,1
but I am not yet ready to try that.

Thanks in advance for your help in this. It would be nice if the PF folks
added these options to their web-based Configurator tool.

Gary Ittner P7
"Have glider, will race"

"Steve Koerner" wrote in message
...

The ability to read a meaningful climb rate for other gliders is
potentially a very nice feature.

It would be a disastrous feature, causing every glider in the area to
converge on the One Best Thermal. Ironically, people would then be using an
anti-collision technology to reduce their separation from other aircraft and
thereby increase their chance of collisions.

Gary Ittner P7
"Have glider, will race"

On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 1:10:27 PM UTC-4, Gary Ittner wrote:
"Evan Ludeman" wrote in message

...

I flew the Sports Class Nats with Powerflarm Brick (v 3.0), Butterfly 57mm

display (v 3.1).



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 Ludeman / T8





Thanks, Evan, for your review of competition and stealth modes. I would like

to set my PowerFlarms to competition mode, but am unsure how to proceed.



The Data Port Specifications, version 6.00E, page 16, gives a value of

"0x02" to Enable Competition Mode, but the examples immediately below show

integer values. So, is the proper sub-sentence: $PFLAC,S,CFLAGS,0x02 or

$PFLAC,S,CFLAGS,2 or something else?



I am unwilling to experiment because it also says, "If you do not understand

the concept of bit flags, do not use this command!"



It is clear that the sub-sentence for stealth mode is: $PFLAC,S,PRIV,1

but I am not yet ready to try that.



Thanks in advance for your help in this. It would be nice if the PF folks

added these options to their web-based Configurator tool.



Gary Ittner P7

"Have glider, will race"

Hi Gary,

From my flarmcfg.txt file


################################################## ######################
# stealth & competition configuration
################################################## ######################

# set stealth mode on
$PFLAC,S,PRIV,1

# set competition mode (ON = 2, OFF = 0)
$PFLAC,S,CFLAGS,2



If flarm starts using other bits of cflags to manipulate other settings, then it will get a little more complicated. For now this should work.


T8

On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 12:09:07 PM UTC-5, Steve Koerner wrote:
The holy grail of glider technology is the ability to read the strength of thermals at a distance. So far, accomplishing that has evaded all those who have tried. PowerFlarm offers the best hope for doing just that on a limited scale when there are other gliders in a cooperating network. If you want to view that as a leeching tool, so be it. Glider racing is inherently a cooperating process.



There are folks now that are advocating voice cooperation between racers. Certainly the subject PowerFlarm functionality is fairer and more benign than having guys off on a separate frequency discussing strategies.

Cooperating network and racing used in the same sentence? We're going down the road of bicycle racing team type strategy? My "go racing fund" just became my extra tows, go to Hawaii fund. Ya'll have fun out there racing/cooperating. WR

On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 12:40:28 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 12:06:45 PM UTC-4, Steve Koerner wrote:

Also the climb rate which flarm shows is not compensated nor a good averager. I often see 9.9 knots when the glider is only climbing at 1-2 knots on average. Totally misleading. Flarm knows groundspeed which is usually close enough to airspeed to allow a first order TE compensation calculation.. I think we should expect Flarm to get that on their To-Do list. Also, Flarm should not pass any number for climb rate until enough integration time has passed that the number has become usefully stable and meaningful (until the reading stabilizes, we should just see two dashes in the display). Now that all of the basic functions of PowerFlarm are working, this is the time to do refinement. The ability to read a meaningful climb rate for other gliders is potentially a very nice feature. When this is working right, I suspect that folks will be less likely to choose stealth mode.



So now that Flarm folks have finally provided the deliverables promised, i.e reliable collision avoidance and flight logging, both of which are/were needed, and were the selling points, they should get to work and make it a better leeching tool than it already is, which more than a few of us think we do not need.

Hopefully they will be as slow in that effort as they were on the primary product.

More work will be needed by "someone" to develop a way to get information without giving it. That would be the obvious next step in Flarm Radar wars..

The "situational awareness" argument is simply a canard to get people to buy this device in order to try to remain competitive. Collision avoidance as currently provided, is a good improvement to our safety margins. That is all we really need.

One guy's opinion.

UH

FWIW...

We have to look at this problem in chunks:

- Data acquisition
- Data transmission
- Data analysis
- Presentation

Today, FLARM has clearly done a great job on all of these with the primary focus of collision avoidance. I get that. We all need to applaud them for that.

However, as this thread illustrates, once the primary purpose is refined, we're naturally asking "so what's next"?

The key to a real Tactical Leaching Tool (TLT) is whether or not the data acquisition and transmission are controlled. Frankly, once anyone has 5-7 data elements delivered at some relatively high refresh rate (aircraft, position, altitude and time being all that's really required), anyone else with access to that could easily build some pretty nice tools into the current and next generation of Flight Displays. Everything from smoothing algorithms to averaging the calculated lift from multiple targets in the same thermal to a "hot key" to highlight 5 pre-identified competitors are all on the horizon. I don't at all buy the arguments that "it hasn't happened in Europe" or "the information isn't meaningful because of x,y, or z." Once real focus is put on massaging the data for a new purpose, these arguments will go away.

See Gary Ittner's post immediately below this one. The implications of a real TLT are significant, and it would be nice to have thought this out before we have to deal with a new set of unintended consequences.