kirk.stant wrote on 4/27/2018 8:04 PM:
On Friday, April 27, 2018 at 11:30:14 AM UTC-5, Jonathan St. Cloud wrote:
How many of those 13 private gliders have transponders? I fly in the west and we have very good adoption of transponders and Flarm in the private ships and XC ships at commercial operations. Most of the trainers do not have radios let alone any other electronics. I am fine with that, the FBO's have a hard enough time making any money, and after all we do operate in a VFR environment, see and avoid.

Maybe 4? I don't. If I was out west I would immediately put one in, but here we are lucky to get above 6000' - and Powerflarm is a lot more useful than a transponder for avoiding all the VFR low alt traffic. Not dissing Xponders - if someone wants to give me a TT-21 when they upgrade to a TT-22 for ADS-B out I'll be happy to install it!

I've read the TT-21 can be upgraded to a TT-22 for ~$800-$1000, so you should look
for another path to a cheap transponder :^)

Since you don't need ADSB, that path could be a mode C transponder, as many are
now available for $500-$1000 (transponder, encoder, and cabling!) as people
upgrade to mode S transponders here and in Europe.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)
- "A Guide to Self-Launching Sailplane Operation"
https://sites.google.com/site/motorg...ad-the-guide-1
- "Transponders in Sailplanes - Dec 2014a" also ADS-B, PCAS, Flarm

http://soaringsafety.org/prevention/...anes-2014A.pdf