On Friday, May 24, 2013 2:27:48 PM UTC-4, Dave Nadler wrote:
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

No, definitely not "power plane" -- that would have been much worse and limited to specific gliders. This was was endemic at 15s last year and similar though less intense at New Castle. Looking ahead 25 seconds with a reasonable envelope in a packed thermal will result in a lot of overlap and nuisance alarms. I get that. I decided to experiment with available options to deal with the specific issue of contest flying, I report that they work well.

Stealth mode appears to work great if all you want is anti-collision warning. Guess what? All I want from flarm in contest flying is anti-collision warning. Again, it works well. You've said several times 'not recommended' in all caps, but you've never stated a reason. If there is an engineering or safety related reason, please state it. I'm tempted by context to presume the real reason is marketing (the ability to track other pilots....).

T8