PowerFLARM choking on too many targets?

On Tuesday, July 21, 2015 at 11:27:20 AM UTC-7, Richard wrote:
On Monday, July 20, 2015 at 7:52:41 PM UTC-7, Matt Herron Jr. wrote:
Today I flew the first day of the Truckee FAI contest. We had about 14 planes in the launch area at once. All pilots had Flarm (and transponders) which was great.

My setup is a PowerFlarm Brick (V6.02) with a FlarmVIew display (latest firmware, and powered by the brick). V7 and Oudie are also connected to the brick, but powered separately.

When there were more than about 5 targets being tracked by the PowerFLARM, the FlarmView display started to reboot repeatedly and rapidly every few seconds as if it were being power cycled. It behaved normally during the task when there were just a few targets at most to display. On landing there were again many targets in close proximity and the FlarmVIew display started to reboot again.

Has anyone experienced this? I don't know how to tell if it is the Powerflarm's fault, recycling the power to the FlarmVIew display or the FlarmView Display itself getting overwhelmed by so many targets.

Thoughts?

Also, the PowerFlarm brick experienced MANY GPS failures during the last two flights. The Oudie kept switching to secondary GPS (internal). TO be fair, the Colibri II also showed some GPS dropouts on the same flight, but not nearly as many.

Additional thoughts?

Thanks,

Matt Herron

My Flarmview 57 comes from the DB9 port. Also go the the files menu of the Flarmview and convert the .fln file to .flx.

Richard www.craggyaero.com

Also get the latest .fln file from flarmnet.org their may have been a problem with that file

Richard
www.craggyaero.com

Allow me to add something that happened to me last week at Air Sailing Sports Contest. The first 2 days, I was getting meaningless FLARM alerts all the time + both GPSs broke lock several times. A friend asked, "how far apart are your GPS antennas? You know they are supposed to be 12" apart, don't you?
Bingo! All three were within 6" of each other. Both GPS antennas were within 4" of each other and both right behind the FLARM which has its own GPS antenna, you know?
I moved all 3 antennas about a foot from each other and the false FLARM alerts were greatly reduced and the computer GPS never broke lock again...............the Cambridge GPS did continue to drop out when near Air Sailing, but was OK when out on course. Several other contestants reported the same issue when near Air Sailing.
JJ