Experience with Flarm "Stealth" and Competition modes

On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 12:40:28 PM UTC-4, wrote:
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

FWIW...

We have to look at this problem in chunks:

- Data acquisition
- Data transmission
- Data analysis
- Presentation

Today, FLARM has clearly done a great job on all of these with the primary focus of collision avoidance. I get that. We all need to applaud them for that.

However, as this thread illustrates, once the primary purpose is refined, we're naturally asking "so what's next"?

The key to a real Tactical Leaching Tool (TLT) is whether or not the data acquisition and transmission are controlled. Frankly, once anyone has 5-7 data elements delivered at some relatively high refresh rate (aircraft, position, altitude and time being all that's really required), anyone else with access to that could easily build some pretty nice tools into the current and next generation of Flight Displays. Everything from smoothing algorithms to averaging the calculated lift from multiple targets in the same thermal to a "hot key" to highlight 5 pre-identified competitors are all on the horizon. I don't at all buy the arguments that "it hasn't happened in Europe" or "the information isn't meaningful because of x,y, or z." Once real focus is put on massaging the data for a new purpose, these arguments will go away.

See Gary Ittner's post immediately below this one. The implications of a real TLT are significant, and it would be nice to have thought this out before we have to deal with a new set of unintended consequences.