FLARM in Stealth Mode at US 15M/Standard Nationals - Loved It!

Please remember this threat started out by saying P3 he competed at the 15m Nat's with stealth mode and really enjoyed it. It really did work fine as an anti-collision device.

I'd make sure that folks understand that FLARM sends two different messages to the display devices.

The $PFLAU sentence has priority and contains info about intruder alerts and obstacles. The contest ID is removed in stealth mode. Alerts are unaffected no matter the range. It really works quite well with the algorithm the FLARM people have developed.

The $PFLAA sentence is info about proximate aircraft displayed on your device. In stealth mode this info limited to aircraft within 2 km and +/- 300 meters vertically. Stealth or competition mode also removes ID, climb rate, track and speed from the display output for these proximate aircraft. It continues to use these variables to calculate the collision avoidance algorithm in $PFLAU.

Folks should read FLARM release notes for FLARM 6.02 Firmware, FLARM data port specification TFD-12 and FTD-14 FLARM Configuration Specification for full understanding. Anyway, we found it worked well and the contest was definitely still fun for all.

On another note, has anyone noticed the big divide on opinions on this topic for eastern pilots versus western pilots? I suspect the different kind of contest flying has something to do with this perception. Eastern contests have their lower working bands with land-outs being more common and more of a deciding in the results. Western contests have higher heights, faster speeds and better visibility. In the west land outs will definitely sink you but are more rare. They can also be quite remote and potentially scary.

XC