Experience with Flarm "Stealth" and Competition modes

On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 12:06:45 PM UTC-4, Steve Koerner wrote:
Also the climb rate which flarm shows is not compensated nor a good averager. I often see 9.9 knots when the glider is only climbing at 1-2 knots on average. Totally misleading. Flarm knows groundspeed which is usually close enough to airspeed to allow a first order TE compensation calculation. I think we should expect Flarm to get that on their To-Do list. Also, Flarm should not pass any number for climb rate until enough integration time has passed that the number has become usefully stable and meaningful (until the reading stabilizes, we should just see two dashes in the display). Now that all of the basic functions of PowerFlarm are working, this is the time to do refinement. The ability to read a meaningful climb rate for other gliders is potentially a very nice feature. When this is working right, I suspect that folks will be less likely to choose stealth mode.

So now that Flarm folks have finally provided the deliverables promised, i.e reliable collision avoidance and flight logging, both of which are/were needed, and were the selling points, they should get to work and make it a better leeching tool than it already is, which more than a few of us think we do not need.
Hopefully they will be as slow in that effort as they were on the primary product.
More work will be needed by "someone" to develop a way to get information without giving it. That would be the obvious next step in Flarm Radar wars.
The "situational awareness" argument is simply a canard to get people to buy this device in order to try to remain competitive. Collision avoidance as currently provided, is a good improvement to our safety margins. That is all we really need.
One guy's opinion.
UH