PowerFlarm at Region 9 Contest

On Wednesday, June 12, 2013 12:03:26 PM UTC-4, Evan Ludeman wrote:

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.

I'll buy that it is a bad joke if you're close to a number of transponder equipped gliders.

PCAS may have some utility in a really empty sky, but being non-directional, it's a pretty limited sort of utility.

A lot of ZAON owners would strenuously disagree that PCAS is a bad joke. Plus I was under the impression that the early problems with PF PCAS missing alerts that ZAON would catch had largely been resolved.

For a non-racer starting with the bare minimum of gadgets, a selling point of PF is that it incorporates PCAS, approved logger, and provides high quality NEMA GPS to other instruments (like a V7 vario or a PNA) that might need it.


With any density of "friendly" transponder traffic (for example at a contest), you'll want to turn PCAS off.


But turn it back ON when you're in the vicinity of random GA traffic, right? Do you really think that PCAS is of marginal utility?