I was serious though. A friend of mine has a transponder for his paramotor, to allow him to fly in controlled airspace. He's certainly not the only one. Few aircraft are more weight and (electrical) power limited than a paramotor, right? So how can it be so hard to fit them to all other aircraft?
Or is this really more of a cost issue than a weight and power issue?
Firstly, I'm not at all sure that fitting a transponder in your flight suit pocket or on a chest pack "flight deck", is a safe or sensible thing to do. If it were me, I'd want some hard evidence that putting a 200 to 250 watt peak power microwave transmitter on my body was safe - not some hypothetical guess based on most probable average power, based on a minimal number of interrogations per hour. Work I did on the physiological effects of using hand-held portable radios many years ago showed that some of them were a potential problem for regular users.
Secondly, at the current price levels a transponder costs about the same as a good wing. In effect, it doubles the price of a paraglider and adds maybe 50% to the cost of a paramotor rig.
There is also the power source issue. Somehow you got to find enough power to keep the transponder operating reliably for a few hours. This takes a big battery, as few paramotors have any charging circuitry at all.
Lastly, there is the added problem of the risk of injury that carrying bulky stuff carries when operating a paramotor. Falling over is an occupational hazard when launching or landing these machines, so any hard and bulky bit of kit will both get bashed about and add to the possibility of injury.
Seems a bloody daft thing to do to me, especially as this is a machine that can only legally be flown under VFR, clear of cloud etc, isn't normally allowed to fly in controlled airspace and what's more cannot operate from most airfields, due to the restrictions it would place on other users.
VP