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This ADS-B In is AWESOME!

fliier

Well Known Member
Let me just say that after struggling with this avionics upgrade for 5 months and dealing with the Navworx song and dance for 8 months, this ads-b stuff is really fantastic.

I took a little flight around the LA basin without flight following this afternoon, which I would never do normally, simply because I knew where the targets were, their relative altitude, and the direction they were moving. I thought I was only going to see the other ads-b equipped aircraft, but instead I see everyone.

So cool. So worth the money for me.

I'm running the Naxworx ads600-exp with the Transmon device. It displays on a GRT Sport.
 
Careful!

I thought I was only going to see the other ads-b equipped aircraft, but instead I see everyone.

Don't get complacent with ADS-B. You will NOT see on your screen any aircraft that are operating without a transponder. Further, the mode C altitude reported by those that you do see could very well be wrong. ATC doesn't trust unverified mode C altitudes for separation and neither should we.

I do agree though, much improved awareness, knowing where to look for traffic.
 
Don't get complacent with ADS-B. You will NOT see on your screen any aircraft that are operating without a transponder. Further, the mode C altitude reported by those that you do see could very well be wrong. ATC doesn't trust unverified mode C altitudes for separation and neither should we.

I do agree though, much improved awareness, knowing where to look for traffic.

The picture we get on ADSB would not differ at all from the picture we get from ATC for these situations.

Caution is always good, but let's not go casting shadows without good reason.
 
Radar Vs ADSB

Wouldn't ATC be able to see all the traffic/targets regardless or wether or not they had a transponder turned on? Terrain dependant of course. ADSB sounds like it definately helps but I wouldn't think it would see as much as ATC or an aircraft equipped with radar.
 
Wouldn't ATC be able to see all the traffic/targets regardless or wether or not they had a transponder turned on? Terrain dependant of course. ADSB sounds like it definately helps but I wouldn't think it would see as much as ATC or an aircraft equipped with radar.

Without mode C (or S) ATC has no idea of an aircraft's altitude. And some fiberglass aircraft have low reflectivity, and may or may not show up as a primary target. Non-military aircraft with radar usually have radar designed to see weather, not aircraft.

If you have ADSB-out and -in you should see everything ATC sees that's close to you.
 
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If you have ADSB-in you should see everything ATC sees that's close to you.

Well not really! You have to be near an aircraft with ADSB-Out or have ADSB-Out yourself. If you are not near an ADSB-Out aircraft or do not have ADSB-Out, you will not see any aircraft traffic.
 
Well not really! You have to be near an aircraft with ADSB-Out or have ADSB-Out yourself. If you are not near an ADSB-Out aircraft or do not have ADSB-Out, you will not see any aircraft traffic.

Opps, I meant out but said in. Thanks, I fixed it.
The OP said he had the navworxEXP so he should have in and out.
 
Without mode C (or S) ATC has no idea of an aircraft's altitude. And some fiberglass aircraft have low reflectivity, and may or may not show up as a primary target. Non-military aircraft with radar usually have radar designed to see weather, not aircraft.

If you have ADSB-out and -in you should see everything ATC sees that's close to you.

And there are a lot of rag and tube, no electrics aircraft that show as just a shadow on their screens. Not to mention people flying around with their transponders off, which does happen from time to time.
 
PLUS... Its not just us that is not up to speed for 2020. ATC is not either. There have been multiple times in the last 2 years (since installing certified ADS600-BG) that there have been craft around me that absolutely should have been on my screen and they were not. In both cases I can only assume that the ground part of the equation was not working right. One was a 737 near KGSO for goodness sake. Happened again last Friday near KAVL which is actually pretty normal. I hardly ever see traffic via TIS-B in that geographic bowl. I assume their hand crank radar system has not been upgraded yet.
 
don't forget to keep your eyes outside 80% of the time. there is also birds that are a big concern. be safe.
 
Don?t rain on my epiphany.

All good points I agree, but perhaps we are MORE distracted without the onboard traffic.

Here?s the ugly truth about my brain. When the controller calls out ?RV2JA, traffic, 10 o'clock, 2 miles, south-bound, Cherokee, 4,500.? , in my mind I have to remember what an analog clock looks like, then lay that out horizontal and superimpose the cardinal compass points over it to figure out which way is southbound (because I?m following my moving map track up). I then try to remember what altitude he said the Cherokee was at, and then mentally picture what an aircraft that size is going to look like at that distance (?what distance did he say??) at a point relative to the horizon, assuming some WAG at closure rates. Then I pull my trusty finger out and physically point to the point on the windshield through which I expect to see the other airplane. While I?m pointing like an idiot I double-check the whole calculation in my head, all the while wondering if the controller laid out the clock right in HIS head and if I should really be looking at 4 o?clock instead of 10 o?clock.

But now. . . I?m sitting there in front of the EFIS and I ?see? the Cherokee relative to my position with an arrow pointing to her direction of flight and a data box saying she is 1,450 ft. below me. I look in her direction but realize that I don?t need the analog clock or the compass points or the other aircraft?s altitude or the distance. I happen to be monitoring the frequency and in a few seconds I hear the controller call out ?Cherokee 4SA, traffic, 8 o'clock, 2 miles, west-bound, type unknown, indicating 6,500.? I?m not hyper-focused on the Cherokee. I AM looking for it but I?m also looking for that Red-Tailed Hawk, or for the next target that just appeared on the screen.

The point being, the Controller didn?t bring anything to the table (for me) in this scenario, except had I been talking to him we would have consumed bandwidth while he told me what I already knew. I could just as easily be listening to Mahler without the distraction of radio-cutouts and/or watching for that NORDO traffic. The ADS-B was not a distraction, it was 10 times better than having my head constantly on a swivel trying to pick targets that might be there out of the ground clutter.

Isn?t this the vision of ADS-B, with controller?s having to do less radio chatter telling us to ?Look OUT!!!, thus freeing up the bandwidth so they can help all those poor souls whose brains have locked up after their third practice approach.

So here?s my current question. Right now I have my ADS-B set to always transmit my identifying information, even when squawking VFR. I originally did this because it helped to get my FAA report without actually having to get an assigned squawk. Now, however, I?m thinking I will leave it on. The primary reason is so when I do need to speak with a controller it should be quicker to identify me, since he will already my numbers and type on the screen. The second reason is that if I?m not using flight following and something happens, there will still be a record associating me with my flight path ( I?m not really worried about the FAA ?busting? me, since in the past 30 years of flying in the system I have never had to make a phone call) Does anyone know if my assumptions about how the system works are correct?

Oh, and this ADS-B mandate that I once thought was just another heavy-handed mandate by the FAA. . . it's a freakin' gift. My bad.

John Allen
RV-6A flying since 2001
 
Isn?t this the vision of ADS-B, with controller?s having to do less radio chatter telling us to ?Look OUT!!!, thus freeing up the bandwidth so they can help all those poor souls whose brains have locked up after their third practice approach.

01

I hate to disillusion you. The FAA's vision is to have pilots pay for ADSB so the FAA can stop paying for expensive radar equipment.
 
I hate to disillusion you. The FAA's vision is to have pilots pay for ADSB so the FAA can stop paying for expensive radar equipment.

...and that's a fail too because primary radar is never going to go away. Not in a post-9/11 world, and not so long as ADS-B is an insecure/unencrypted system.
 
And less than half the fleet is equipped currently, so there are a LOT of bandits out there that are not showing up on your screen...
 
ADS-B Traffic coverage

Regarding. . .

And less than half the fleet is equipped currently, so there are a LOT of bandits out there that are not showing up on your screen...

The ADS-B traffic also displays aircraft that are not ADS-B equipped, as long as they have their transponder on. From the FAA website:

"TIS-B is a client-based service that provides ADS-B Out/In equipped aircraft with surveillance information about aircraft that are not ADS-B equipped. To qualify as a TIS-B target, an aircraft must be equipped with a transponder, and be within radar coverage."

http://www.faa.gov/nextgen/equipadsb/ins_and_outs/
 
Regarding. . .



The ADS-B traffic also displays aircraft that are not ADS-B equipped, as long as they have their transponder on. From the FAA website:

"TIS-B is a client-based service that provides ADS-B Out/In equipped aircraft with surveillance information about aircraft that are not ADS-B equipped. To qualify as a TIS-B target, an aircraft must be equipped with a transponder, and be within radar coverage."

http://www.faa.gov/nextgen/equipadsb/ins_and_outs/

So the uplink supposedly only sends up traffic plus/minus 3500' vertically of you (or something like that). What do they do with mode A traffic? Send it all, altitude unknown? Send none?
 
Mode A traffic is uplinked with no altitude data, and it's up to the cockpit display to make this clear to the pilot. The only traffic not shown on ADS-B are aircraft with no transponders at all.

In hundreds of hours of flying with ADS-B and tens of thousands of targets I've only ever noticed one target without altitude. Technically that could have been a Mode-C with a failed altitude encoder or in no-alt mode as well.
 
After 9 months flying with ADSB traffic, I wouldn't trade it for anything!... Theres no telling how many times I have flown close to another plane in the past and never knew they were there! It has trained me in finding aircraft outside with my eyes. There are so many I still cant spot but I'm aware of them anyway. I originally thought this device would cause pilots to become lazy about watching outside but has had the opposite effect on me. :D
 
I regularly fly a 1946 Luscombe without an engine-driven electrical system. NORDO quite often. Negative transponder most all the time. Lots of Cubs, Taylorcrafts, experimentals, antiques and classics w/o engine-driven electrical systems do the same. Our Luscombe 8A is based at a Class C airport so we charge up a battery to run our transponder until clear on the way out and then again prior to contacting approach on the way back in. It is off the rest of the time. Remember that these types of aircraft are exempt from the ADS-B 2020 mandate and will continue to operate, even within the currently defined Class B Mode C veil areas, after 2020.

NORDO is nice sometimes. At pilot-controlled fields there are no nitwits announcing they are about to start their engine at the T-Hangars or are taxiing to the gas pumps while I am on short final with real traffic in the air.

Even if an owner of a non engine-driven electrical system aircraft decided to install a rechargeable battery and an ADS-B out unit just to be neighborly, it wouldn't work. The current regulation states that if an aircraft is ADS-B out equipped the ADS-B out equipment must be on and operating at all times during flight without exception. So a non-electrical airplane configured this way would run out of electrical battery juice before reaching their destination at which point in flight they've become non-compliant. Without the ADS-B equipment on board this violation scenario cannot occur.

We may have to reposition our bird to another field in 2020. Which may be one of the alterior bearueacratic objectives.

Fortunately all these non-electrical aircraft (except for the occasional Breezy) are equipped with the most advanced moving map displays, with resolutions exceeding 4K and more nits of brightness than any of the displays offered by Apple, Dynon or Garmin. They will make a Cirrus pilot edgy and envious between chute deployments. There are no drill-down menus. They always have the latest firmware and software version, updated instantaneously in flight. These dispalys are affectionately referred to by their owners (who can read them confusing analog clocks) as "windshields".
 
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...let's not go casting shadows without good reason....

This isn't intended to bash ATC but there are good reasons to have doubts and verify.

I have personally run into the situation where a Mode C target was putting out zero for an altitude in an area where surface was 900+ MSL - an impossible condition. ATC sees the target, but not talking to it. If I fly at 3000 AGL, the system acts as though the target is outside the puck and doesn't tell me anything about the traffic.

This is a case where installed equipment on the Mode C target isn't correct and ATC hasn't verified the altitude - this is one that could, in fact, be a problem but that ADSB won't help you with.

Dan
 
I had a time when i was showing off the ADS-B traffic capabilities to a passenger. "See it shows you all the airplane traffic. Cool huh?" Right there, she says why dont i see that airplane in front of us?

Sure enough, a huge 747 departing SFO Rwy 28 probably headed to China. Sure enough, nothing on the screen??? My response was like, "Yeah, it only shows you traffic within 15 mi or 3500 ft." blah blah blah. However, to my named eye, it looked within that volume window only 3 or 4 miles out. Houston, we have a problem?

Nothing else as blatant as that yet. However, there was a system upgrade in the Fall of 2015 that disabled my ADS-B in system as well. I guess the FAA decided to do upgrades early in my area. Took a week or two for everyone to figure out what was happening.

Traffic alerts have saved me several times. However, like everyone says, it's not quite yet perfect, like all of our airplanes. ;)
 
A few years back we were IFR southbound west of SFO when one of those 747s popped out of the clouds below us just like the opening to the movie "Airplane".

Everyone started singing the Jaws theme "Da-dump......Da-dump.....dum dum dum dum"
 
Loving my ADSB-IN more and more...

This morning I was flying just after sunrise and thinking to myself that I really needed to keep my eyes open and outside because I knew the local farmers would have the crop-dusters busy putting glyphosate down, and I was in their backyard. As I descended through about 2000' AGL into my home strip, sure enough a glance at the map screen showed me two targets a couple hundred feet off the ground, reversing directions every dozen seconds or so. Good to know where they are...
 
Loving my ADSB-IN more and more...

This morning I was flying just after sunrise and thinking to myself that I really needed to keep my eyes open and outside because I knew the local farmers would have the crop-dusters busy putting glyphosate down, and I was in their backyard. As I descended through about 2000' AGL into my home strip, sure enough a glance at the map screen showed me two targets a couple hundred feet off the ground, reversing directions every dozen seconds or so. Good to know where they are...

What scares me more are the drones some of these guys are using to take pictures and gather data on their crops!
 
At the verge on continuing the topic digression....
Very few, if any, crop dusters I know have transponders. I am talking about the straight agricultural flyers here. And probably only 2/3 have vhf coms. The fire bomber and law enforcement versions of ag aircraft always have a whole compliment of avionics.

In fact most $1.6M Air Tractors are delivered from the factory in Olney, TX to ag pilots are without avionics of any kind (and out of rig but that's another story). Even those buyers who want a modicum of avionics add them after they get the plane delivered from the factory (and re-rig the aircraft properly). A very good friend of mine who worked for the largest Air Tractor dealer in AR delivered more factory-new turbine Air Tractors than about anybody I know and more than half the time he was NORDO. The other half he had a handheld transceiver in his kit. He always had a trusty Garmin GPSMAP with him but that was about it. One day he almost had to whup a corporate pilot wearing epaulets at an uncontrolled field who came over and started yelling at him for not calling out his pattern on the radio even though he didn't have a radio and all the while safely maintained visual contact with traffic. It had already been a long day and finally my buddy had to tell the gentleman that he was going to jump down off the AT and beat the **** out of the guy if he didn't get back over to his airplane and unload some luggage or something to which the persnickety fellow started his retreat.

Aside from all the story telling (there's always more isn't there), the point is I am very impressed you found a couple of ag operators with transponders cooperating with the ATC and by default ADS-B system. Remember most ag planes don't get high enough to transmit or receive any ground-based ADS-B station signals. Same goes for pipeline patrolers.

To complete the topic digression, I am in the process of adding a Mode C transponder to an AT402 that sprays along the US/Mexican border in an effort to eliminate daily calls to the Air and Marine Operations Center in Riverside, CA so they know who it is making those sweeping turns above the border. https://youtu.be/ReoSpl90dok

Meanwhile back on topic. I am really impressed by the specifications and price point of the NavWorx ADS600-EXP and can see why there has been a bit of a waiting list. I would like to install one in my RV-3B and will probably decide at or after OSH where I can visit the different "compatible" EFIS vendors (MGL, GRT, iFly etc...).

Oh, and "Viva UAT out" and it's anonymous mode helping to maintain our civil rights to enjoy liberty and privacy. That is, IF your particular UAT out equipment manufacturer supports anonymity (sorry Skyrguard customers). And any domestic light aircraft sods opting for a Modes S or 1090ES transponder are effectively surrendering their right to privacy whether operating inside or outside (1200 squawk) the system.

Jim
 
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I had a time when i was showing off the ADS-B traffic capabilities to a passenger. "See it shows you all the airplane traffic. Cool huh?" Right there, she says why dont i see that airplane in front of us?

Sure enough, a huge 747 departing SFO Rwy 28 probably headed to China. Sure enough, nothing on the screen??? My response was like, "Yeah, it only shows you traffic within 15 mi or 3500 ft." blah blah blah. However, to my named eye, it looked within that volume window only 3 or 4 miles out. Houston, we have a problem?

Nothing else as blatant as that yet. However, there was a system upgrade in the Fall of 2015 that disabled my ADS-B in system as well. I guess the FAA decided to do upgrades early in my area. Took a week or two for everyone to figure out what was happening.

Traffic alerts have saved me several times. However, like everyone says, it's not quite yet perfect, like all of our airplanes. ;)

Those are also symptoms of a non-compliant or misconfigured GPS position source. More info is needed.... The B747 *should* have been uplinked as a TIS-B target. Certainly possible that a FAA software / hardware failure caused the issue though.
 
I can attest that ADS-B Air-to-Air / TIS-B doesn't see all traffic. A few weekends ago I was returning from a fly-in, and had to skirt the APG restricted area to the north. It just so happens that the DCA Mode C veil also terminates nearby, and of course a really old (though apparently restored) high winged plane was headed on a reciprocal course, also skirting the R and just outside the veil. Luckily we were offset by a few hundred feet, and a few hundred feet vertically, because I didn't see him until what seemed like the last second. I never got a traffic warning, and it didn't appear that he saw me at all (didn't alter course.) Lesson learned: Be extra vigilant near restricted airspace and mode C veil borders :)
 
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Jim, you write like a real storyteller. And spell everything correctly. You sure you aren't from back east or someplace?
While in Oshkosh, look closely at GRT. Pretty impressive.
 
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