At my age, being one of the ‘concessions’ (sounds better than Old Age Pensioner) :-) I don’t normally get involved in matters where my contribution may seem contentious and I hope this posting is not taken as a dig at AirNav. That is not my intention.
But he two linked threads:- “The Static and Filters problem etc” and “Radarbox Faulty” are not really getting very far by way of a positive explanation and solution to the problems a number of users are experiencing which would appear to be solely connected to the SAW filter fitted in the earlier RBs.
I feel that AirNav are being a little evasive and could perhaps comment on the points raised below.
Firstly, AirNav said in reply to my earlier posting that:- “It is not a design problem. The levels of returns are still very low for it to be considered an problem. We acted in a maner at the time these came to light to increase the protection in newer batches.”
It quite clearly is a design problem no matter what percentage of users have experienced failure. Otherwise there would be no need to change the spec in boxes manufactured after July 2008.
Would you expect, or do you not think it reasonable to assume more of the earliest boxes will sooner or later develop this fault?
From todays posting it would appear that the new spec filter significantly increased the number of flights daveg4otu logged from even before the filter ‘failed’.
Have you done tests with older and newer boxes running side by side? Could it be that users who have boxes in the earlier batch have less contacts than those with later ones and would never know unless the filter ‘went worse’ and their RBs had to be returned?? If so, shouldn’t all boxes made before the July 2008 ones be recalled and modified.
In his first posting, daveg4otu said:-
"My question is this ... is it static via the antenna causing this? - or is there a more deepseated cause (design flaw perhaps)?
I struggle to see how static is going to cause this - after all any antenna is exposed to wind/rain etc .....if static was going to do this - then I might expect my scanner, Digibox and any other radio rx/tx to suffer.
As a radio Ham I have had in the past all manner of antennas up in the sky - and other than pulling everything when there was lightning about for safety - I have never had to take any kind of extra precautions"
Sounds reasonable to me.
Is there an explanation as to why, if you are convinced there is no design problem, and that static is indeed the cause of the problem, why it only affects RadarBoxes and not the competitor’s units and why it affects them no matter whether the supplied antenna or an alternative is connected?
Regards
Syd
