.
Just testing out two new PAW units, and noticing that errors are not always displayed. So you could be operating a ‘defective’ unit and not realise that traffic is not being displayed.
a. Covering up the ADSB and PAW aerials will delete contacts, and bring up a warning on the home page - but not on the compass rose display. (ADSB may give a warning simply because it has not detected any aircraft recently, not because it has become disconnected.)
b. Covering up the GPS aerial will prevent navigation, and give erronious positions or not show any contacts (it seemed to carry on with ‘dead rekoning’ for five minutes or more.) Again the home page gives a GPS error message, but not the compass rose.
c. The wifi can jump onto another wifi signal, and lose all the contacts in the compas rose. If the wifi signal is lost completely, a red warning appears on the compass rose — but not if the tablet jumps to another wifi signal. This could happen in flight, if a passenger had an iPhone with a wifi hotspot. The display needs to somehow confirm that it is still connected to a Pilotaware wifi, and has not jumped onto the clubhouse wifi.
In each case, you may end up with a blank compass rose, indicating no traffic, when there may be lots of conflicting traffic. This could be solved by a row of warnings on the compass rose, similar to the warnings on the home page.
CPU (tick) (system status ok)
WIFI (tick)
GPS (tick)
ADSB (tick)
PAW (tick)
SUBS (tick) (the annual subscription)
Similar warnings might be nice on Sky Demon and others, if they would be agreeable.
Incidentally, trying to stop the GPS navigating was interesting. I put the GPS remotely in a thick cooking pot with metal lid, to form a faraday cage. But the 2mm gap for the wires was enough to give 5 satellite contacts. Baco foil sealing all the gaps finaly stopped it.
Tx
.
