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Old 11th Feb 2018, 03:00
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giggitygiggity
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
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Not a policy in my airline, but in dodgy looking skies, I do like to whack the manual gain up to see what it shows. If there is absolutely nothing there, it just displays black or random grain, if there is anything vaguely there, it will draw it. That's on an RDR-4000, our old manual system seemed much better at finding the tiniest but of weather on the automatic setting.

Multiscan seems to dismiss weather that would better be avoided. With the cabin secure, as an experiment, we flew through a cloud we were visual with in day VMC that we would have probably dodged around normally. It showed nothing more than occasional green on the radar display. It wasn't horrendous, but it presented with some decent turbulence that was getting on for moderate, which we probably would have rather avoided. At night we wouldn't have bother dodging around it according to the radar display. It seems pretty shy to call out a TCU in my opinion when our previous completely manual weather radar would have told us to avoid using the standard settings/guidance.

Additionally, the RDR-4000 from Honeywell should draw areas of hail, active thunderstorms etc. Recently, we flew past a pretty violent thunderstorm over Cork in Ireland, whilst it was fairly low level (<FL300) it was still was very active, with lightning flashes at <1 second intervals. It didn't draw the thunderstorm symbol at the normal gain settings. If it only draws that symbol with a 200nm CB extending to FL500, then that's not a lot of use as we'd avoid that area based on the normal radar returns anyway!
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