On Wednesday, June 12, 2013 11:36:50 AM UTC-4, K wrote:
Hatches just blow, condoms break, and occasionally PF might miss an alert, but the technology is valid.

Enjoying the discussion...

About PF... it's worth breaking down the package a bit for discussion of merits (and not-so-merits), especially for benefit of newcomers and skeptics. It's two very well integrated technologies with a third total lashup (barely) along for the ride. I'm speaking of flarm and ADSB on the one hand and PCAS transponder alerts on the other. For those of you with power flarm and a third party display capable of plotting ADSB traffic (e.g. ClearNav), you've probably already seen as I have just how much commercial and biz jet turbo traffic has adopted ADSB and it's great. Range is tens of miles, I now filter this in the interest of clutter removal to delta altitudes and ranges that I care about. It works *really* well. And if you get close, powerflarm will call out the traffic just as it does for flarm targets. Flarm, as already covered at length, works well too (given proper installation).

PCAS on the other hand is just a bad joke, especially if you are flying in proximity to gliders with transponders. The "alerts" in that case are continuous and therefore completely useless. PCAS may have some utility in a really empty sky, but being non-directional, it's a pretty limited sort of utility. It would be enhanced somewhat if we could differentiate 1200 from 1202 from everything else, which I am told we cannot due to technical limitations in what is still largely 1950s technology. With any density of "friendly" transponder traffic (for example at a contest), you'll want to turn PCAS off.

My $0.02

Evan Ludeman / T8