On Thursday, July 2, 2015 at 10:12:49 PM UTC-7, jfitch wrote:
I am getting this bitching Betty alarm every so often. It may do it for a minute or so, then goes away, then comes again.

Looking at the Flarm IGC file, there are comment lines that look like this:

LFLA213757GPS 7 45

Which I believe represents GPS status (7 satellites?)

Then I get some that look like this:

LFLA213857GPS 0 0

No satellites? The B field time stamps show a lat and long 4 seconds before and 4 seconds after. In the flight today I got 14 of these and about that many warnings (I didn't count the warnings).

This didn't happen last year, started coincident with the 6.0.2 firmware "upgrade".

Can anyone shed any light on this? Can't find any spec from Flarm that describes it.

I have now written an XL parser for the Flarm IGC file, which counts the instances of dropped fixes. I found no dropped fixes at all from flights in 2013. I found dropped fixes in one flight in 2014, 56 dropped on one particular flight, none in any others. I have now 3 flights in 2015 with the new firmware. 1st flight shows 19 dropped fixes, 2nd flight 373 dropped fixes, 3rd flight 882 (and all fairly short flights too). Not an encouraging trend.

The reason I am now aware of it, is that the new Flarm firmware announces bad fixes with the Lxxxxxx GPS 0 0 comment line, and the Air Vario announces it to me with a voice warning. Didn't do that before.