Ground Station display

[exfirepro]

Looks like I need to renew my EasyVFR Licence.

Regards

Peter

[Moffrestorer]

Also, when on the ground close to the ground station I probably don’t get an audible alert from it via EasyVFR because that program filters out ground/ground contacts less than 0.1 km distant to reduce  audio clutter.

[exfirepro]

Hi Chris/Lee,

That (restricting audio alerts from targets within 100metres or so) is also a very useful feature, which we should look at ourselves Lee!

Regards

Peter

[PeterG]

Personally I would vote to remove the G-STN option. At a busy airfield like Dunkeswell it just clutters the screen with an aircraft symbol on SD and the associated data.

Of course, if it were possible to choose to include/exclude, that would be best.

[Moffrestorer]

Actually, the distance between ground targets for EVFR to inhibit Alerts may be 0.1 Nm

[jp62]

As the OP here after a discussion with Lee, I totally see the benefit of a groundstation symbol for groundstations, but in Skydemon right now the display of groundstations with an a/c symbol is more that an unsatisfactory feature, it is dangerous and would be considered in the test pilot world (my world) 'unnacceptable.'

Flying today under the edge of the London TMA, with large amounts of traffic around, heads in time needs to be minimised.  The appearance of a groundstation on Skydemon can only be determined as a groundstation on looking in detail at the screen to see the "registration" of the groundstation - needless heads in time and distraction from other traffic.

At Lee's request I put the issue to Skydemon and this is their reply:

"Our policy is that we display every piece of traffic reported.

PilotAware seems to report a ground station as a piece of (albeit static) traffic, therefore we display it. The developer has always been of the opinion that PilotAware should not report ground stations as traffic, because they are not traffic.

Lee’s suggestion that SkyDemon ignores traffic marked as “static” is something we would be reluctant to consider, because we believe this marker is/was designed for things like static tethered balloons, which SkyDemon definitely needs to take into account when performing traffic warning calculations."

I don't mind too much where this is fixed - by PAW, by  Skydemon, but someone should hopefully fix it?  It's a safety concern.

Lee, can I really encourage you to grapple with this and maybe talk to Skydemon to come up with a solution?

Thanks!

JP

[Paul_Sengupta]

You could suggest to Sky Demon Tim that rather than not display "static" targets, he could change the symbol.

[Admin]

Hi All

You could suggest to Sky Demon Tim that rather than not display "static" targets, he could change the symbol.

tried that 

So the annoying thing here - I think we (PilotAware) are probably the only ones using these features in the FLARM dataport spec, so I have no idea who is using tethered baloons for flarm traffic reports, or any other report of a static object.

That being said, I recognise there is a problem, although it seems EasyVFR can handle this perfectly well - listening to users is feedback important, so we will need to put this on a flag so that it can be disabled (for use in SkyDemon)

Thx
Lee

[Moffrestorer]

Lee

Screenshot attached of Ground Station symbol from EasyVFR. Taken this morning and shows PWEGBS, PWHereford, and PWKingstone. PWBroadmeadow ( at U/L symbol on map) was down.

When I got to Abergavenny airstrip Frank Cavaccuti was actually in the process of setting up his own OGN- PAW ground station!

Chris

[PaulSS]

I noticed this comment from Lee on the Sky Demon Forum:

We have added an option in PilotAware to Enable/Disable the position of ground stations to connected navigation devices.
This will be in the next release.

More excellent customer service from the PAW Team and the type of listening to their users that many other companies would do well to emulate 

[Ian Melville]

It would have been better if SkyDemon had complied with the FLARM standard, which they have as a valid protocol.

I don't have an issue with adding options to PAW, however most GA pilots I know just want to turn it on and for it to do it's job of keeping them safe with minimum hassle.