Inverted81:
If you have never been told upon entering CAS that you are on a RCS either the controller is non conforming, OR they do not see or have not identified you on radar
Quite. But if they haven't identified me they can't provide an RCS, which suggests that the reason I've never been told I'm on an RCS is because I never have been on an RCS (on the other hand, we're frequently given a discrete squawk which must mean identification). Which leads me on to your second point:
"ZZZZ Approach" means an approach controller is using procedural methods for the approach i.e. no radar. So you'll be flying full arrival procedures or will be VFR.
"ZZZZ Radar" guess what, means the controller is using a surveillance system to monitor your flight, so full radar vectors etc can be expected to save all those extra procedure miles (unless I'm vectoring of course ) with reference to VFR you'll just get less or no requests for your position.
Indeed. In the zone I'm talking about, in 99% of cases when we transfer from Tower we're told "contact XXXX Approach", and vice versa. In the 1% of cases when the Tower controller says "contact XXXX Radar" and you call them up as Radar, they inevitably respond as XXX Approach!
This may be explained by the fact that in the good old days there were often two approach controllers at this unit - Approach dealt with all the VFRs, while Radar did the IFRs, on the same frequency. By definition this meant that the VFR controller wasn't using radar.
However, to add to the confusion, we regularly get surveillance-based info from "Approach" as we leave the zone - and while on a Basic Service outside it too! I'm not complaining, it's all good stuff and I never assume that someone else is looking out for me, it's just the differences in practice between zones that get me.
NS