Well, well, my question certainly seems to have opened a can of worms here.
Shortstripper has hit the nail on the head regarding the type of flying I plan to do.
All this TCAS & Mode c/s/what ever is just a total & utter waste of time to even contemplate from a cost & weight/power consumption point of view.
I do not intend to go near class A,B,C & probably D airspace, so I do not envisage ever needing to know where the "big stuff" is.
A simple five bob GPS will tell you where you are. All I want to see is perhaps a ten bob GPS compulsorily fitted to or carried by everything that flies that will comunicate with every other ten bob GPS in a radius of 20nm. & display said information on a screen, proximity warning also should not be beyond the bounds of possibility. Ten bob is not meant to be literal by the way!!
This departs completely from "normal" aviation thinking which is usually the current buzz word carried down the mountain on tablets of stone by "them".
It requires some sort of radical out of the box design work by some forward thinking electronics whizkid.
We have mobile phone technology going through the roof for the cost of a fish supper, we have GPSystems becoming ever more accurate, we have calculators running off solar power.
I am probably being ridiculously simplistic here, how difficult is it??
If such a device were to be produced at a cost of a few £hundreds, I would guess that the manufacturer would make a fortune from GA, Microlighters Gyros Hillwalkers & anyone who wants to know where help or danger is, depending on how you use it.
I apologise for screwing up a perfectly logical thread based as it is on current thinking. But I am hoping to generate "out of the box" ideas.
Trevor. NPPL student with a yen for a Kitfox.