SkyDemon Forums

Traffic Voice Alerts and Pilot Aware

http://forums.skydemon.aero/Topic27756.aspx

By TimT - 10/4/2020 3:34:02 PM

I agree that 70% of traffic is bearingless, and at the altitudes I am operating at probably more like 90%.

Until SD introduces spoken warnings for bearingless targets (which could of course be muted in setup for users who don’t want this ‘distraction’) the way I am dealing with this is to put a separate tablet straight in my line of sight. Running SD in track-up mode to show the alert rings for conflicting bearingless traffic, plus the little traffic radar window for TCAS style representation of targets.

Apart from having the option to also get spoken warnings for bearingless traffic, there are a number of possible improvements that partly have been discussed here under their own topics:

- Allow to resize and position the traffic radar window-in-window

- Allow to independently adjust the font size for vertical separation

- Change of notation of vertical separation (from for example “+0.7” to “7” in line with international best practice)

- Within SD there already is frequent ‘double transmission’ between spoken airspace warnings and spoken traffic alerts:
-> Allow allocation of different voices (eg male and female) to the different types of spoken alerts
-> Allow option for incoming traffic alert to mute a parallel airspace alert
-> Use psychoacoustics to spatially separate the two (eg traffic from the right, airspace warnings from the left, assuming that the incoming radio transmissions remain to appear from centre)
By c182driver - 2/10/2019 3:40:46 PM

I'm looking forward to the new traffic voice alerts on the next release. As a Pilot Aware user, this will presumably mean disabling PAW's own voice alerts in favour of what appears to be SD's 'smarter' version. 

However, does anyone know what will happen with audio alerts of bearingless traffic? Will SD have them too? PAW's version is quite effective, giving three increasingly 'threatening' categories of alert and - crucially, given that there is no horizontal distance and direction information - calling out vertical distance/separation if less than 1000 feet, above or below. So when you hear that another a/c is 200 feet above, that can be a useful prompt to descend, even if you're not sure exactly where that other aircraft is. 

On the new SD voice alerts, what - if anything - will you hear if bearingless gets close?