Meeting to discuss FLARM in the USA

touche!

Bert Willing wrote:
How do you know what you have detected *all* threats in time.
Because nobody has ever hit me. Therefore I and/or the other pilots
have /always/ managed to detect and deal with threats successfully.

/ALL/ the pilots who died here in Europe so far have always successfully
detected and dealt with threats.

Except the last one.

Dan G wrote:
On Oct 26, 4:07 pm, Ian wrote:
I have never used it myself [1] but I was chatting about it just a few
days ago with an instructor at a busy ridge site here. His view was
that it's a menace: it generates far too many false alarms, and pilots
who try to evade non-existent hazards may thereby cause significant
danger. What are you supposed to do, he asked, if you get a six-second-
t-death warning about a glider which is supposedly dead ahead but
which you can't see? He reckoned the main problem was that the system
only believes in "cruising" and "thermalling" and gets hopelessly
confused by the turn at the end of a beat on the ridge.

Sounds like you're talking about the SGU trial at Portmoak (or at
least, that's the same as the opinion of one vocal instructor there -
whether or not those are the conclusions the SGU arrive at themselves
remains to be seen). They fly a rather short ridge (only a few km)
which is not representative of normal glider operations - not sure
that their findings, when published, can be extrapolated beyond their
own circumstances.

Lasham, by contrast, did find that Flarm met their needs (no doubt
partly motivated by the fatal collision there in 2004). They're a flat-
land thermal site - probably the busiest in the UK. I think the fact
that their entire fleet (some thirty gliders and tugs) has been fitted
with Flarm, and that many more units are being fitted to the private
fleet there, is a strong endorsement.

Only flown there once and the weather was lousy, but I would hardly call those
things thermals ;-)

Dan

On Oct 28, 5:39 am, Ian wrote:

Because nobody has ever hit me. Therefore I and/or the other pilots
have /always/ managed to detect and deal with threats successfully.


Gee, Ian, do you really believe in that or just trolling? You have
about the same chance to get hit whether you look outside or fly blind
folded! What saves you is the big sky and nothing else. And all the
"threats" you think you detect are most likely non threats, the ones
which catch your eyes as moving targets close by. The real threats are
those which do not move and turned from a dot to full size in less
than 10 seconds. There are very few pilots who can honestly say they
had detected and avoided one of those thanks to just looking outside.

This is where I am sceptical. Yes, I am sure these things will give
lots of extra alerts - they'd hardly be worth buying if they didn't.
But we are not exactly plagued, world wide, by glider-glider
collisions, are we? So what this means is that pilots will spend a lot
more time reacting to false alarms (they must be false, because if
they weren't they'd end in a collision without the magic gadgets).

And what you think the reaction to those false alarm is? Looking
outside and scanning for the threat! Do you see a problem with this?

Ramy

On Oct 29, 1:14 pm, Eric Greenwell wrote:

If gliders everywhere were assigned a separate code, like the 0440 in
Minden, it might be a much easier task. Nearby gliders would not
generate alerts, for example, while airplanes using the 1200 code would be.

The Zaon MRX does not do anything with the squawk code except to
report the host aircraft code. Target tracking and reporting is based
only on signal strength which is interpreted as target distance.
Based on the the designers response to intelligent muting I have no
doubt that intelligent muting based on squawk code would be a non-
starter.

Andy

On Oct 29, 3:55 pm, Robert Danewid
Buy a Colibri FLARM and you have it!

I don't think so! Are you saying the Colibri has integrated PCAS and
reports transponder targets?

Andy

Andy wrote:
On Oct 29, 1:14 pm, Eric Greenwell wrote:
If gliders everywhere were assigned a separate code, like the 0440 in
Minden, it might be a much easier task. Nearby gliders would not
generate alerts, for example, while airplanes using the 1200 code would be.

The Zaon MRX does not do anything with the squawk code except to
report the host aircraft code. Target tracking and reporting is based
only on signal strength which is interpreted as target distance.
Based on the the designers response to intelligent muting I have no
doubt that intelligent muting based on squawk code would be a non-
starter.

It was a general observation that applies to transponder detectors. I
think it would require less processing power and provide better muting
if the unit could determine which threat was a glider and which was an
airplane.

I would like to hear from MRX-equipped (or similar units) pilots that
fly with other gliders equipped with transponders. I've done a limited
amount of it, and with only a few gliders at a time. By setting the
altitude warning band tighter and ocasionally using the mute button on
the MRX (though I'd like the mute to automatically reset after 5 or 10
minutes), I wasn't bothered by excessive alerts.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
* Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly
* "Transponders in Sailplanes" http://tinyurl.com/y739x4
* "A Guide to Self-launching Sailplane Operation" at www.motorglider.org

I've been flying with a Proxalert R-5 for over 5 years. It displays the
squawk code of the threat aircraft so I can tell, at least near Minden, if
it's a glider (0440) or someone not talking to ATC (1200), or if the other
aircraft *is* talking to ATC (discreet code) and thus likely has been told
about me.

The R5's ability to display squawk appears to be not enough of an advantage
to overcome its more expensive price tag and larger form factor as compared
to the diminutive and more popular ZAON

I wonder if enough people asked them to add squawk code display, ZAON would
add that to there next model. I'd buy one.

bumper


"Eric Greenwell" wrote in message
news:Z2UVi.4372$pT.572@trndny07...
Andy wrote:
On Oct 29, 1:14 pm, Eric Greenwell wrote:
If gliders everywhere were assigned a separate code, like the 0440 in
Minden, it might be a much easier task. Nearby gliders would not
generate alerts, for example, while airplanes using the 1200 code would
be.

The Zaon MRX does not do anything with the squawk code except to
report the host aircraft code. Target tracking and reporting is based
only on signal strength which is interpreted as target distance.
Based on the the designers response to intelligent muting I have no
doubt that intelligent muting based on squawk code would be a non-
starter.

It was a general observation that applies to transponder detectors. I
think it would require less processing power and provide better muting if
the unit could determine which threat was a glider and which was an
airplane.

I would like to hear from MRX-equipped (or similar units) pilots that fly
with other gliders equipped with transponders. I've done a limited amount
of it, and with only a few gliders at a time. By setting the altitude
warning band tighter and ocasionally using the mute button on the MRX
(though I'd like the mute to automatically reset after 5 or 10 minutes), I
wasn't bothered by excessive alerts.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
* Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly
* "Transponders in Sailplanes" http://tinyurl.com/y739x4
* "A Guide to Self-launching Sailplane Operation" at www.motorglider.org

On Oct 30, 10:06 pm, Eric Greenwell wrote:

I would like to hear from MRX-equipped (or similar units) pilots that
fly with other gliders equipped with transponders. I've done a limited
amount of it, and with only a few gliders at a time. By setting the
altitude warning band tighter and ocasionally using the mute button on
the MRX (though I'd like the mute to automatically reset after 5 or 10
minutes), I wasn't bothered by excessive alerts.

I have the MRX and have flown at meets where there was at least one
transponder equipped glider. It was not a problem. For the case
where I was nearly mown down by a King Air, the MRX would have given
no protection if one of the other gliders with me had been transponder
equipped and I had muted the MRX. Intelligent muting requires that
the unit will unmute if a new threat is detected. It could perhaps be
made more intelligent if unmute was not activated by a new glider
target but that's debatable.

I think there is great potential for integrating FLARM or ADS-B (with
CDTI) with PCAS devices. I hope that will be discussed at the
meeting.


Andy