What you are describing is a significant problem with the traffic receiver you have chosen. We have hundreds of customers using that device without any problem, so you should really consider contacting the manufacturer.

If a traffic device starts behaving not to protocol, we immediately shut down communications with it because that is dangerous. That is our policy and it ultimately results in a higher integrity of data, and a more trustworthy experience. You could argue that we could quietly ignore a misbehaving traffic device, but it sounds like yours is behaving really badly and I don't have a problem with what we are doing.

If you like, we could borrow the device to ascertain the exact nature of the failures and report them to its manufacturer, but if you can grab some screenshots that will accomplish the same thing.

Hi,

I try to use SD together with TRX-1500 Flarm and Airconnect. On almost every flight I get an "Unexpected GPS data encountered" messages popup. It always complains about PFLAA and PFLAU sentences which as far as I can tell are position reports Flarm receives.

Unfortunately it is quite annoying that SD seems to open up 3 to 10 popups (the amount seems random...) about the same sentence and simultaneously kicks itself out of navigation mode. In my opinion this behavior does not contribute to flight safety since you have to fiddle around to much to get SD back and running! And as a side affect, the flight log is broken which means that if I used one of the time tracking functions, they won't spit out a usable result after the flight.

I noticed that behavior on all SD versions since I installed my Flarm in summer last year until today. I am running SD under Android 4.2.2 on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2.

I also noticed that the more aircraft are in the vicinity which likely have Flarm, the more quickly the  popups appear. So the is a linear trend of Flarms flying around and SD complaining about broken sentences.

SD-Team, can you please change the way SD handles data sentences it deems to be broken in a way that allows the pilot to continue his/her duty of  navigating and to observing traffic. If you still want to track broken sentences, I suggest write them down into a log file for example. In my opinion, it is better for flight safety, to just quietly drop a sentence here and there than waiting for the user to close multiple popups and restart navigation mode.

If there is anything I can do to help you in fixing this issue, please let me know!

Florian