Also, although our blips change size outside the protected range of our RADAR's, SMF does not alter it's tolerance as it is not quite that clever.
Hmmm, ours at ScACC is that clever as I know from experience, though I won't go into details here.
I'd agree that it is not a good idea to test it out - "the controller was testing the SMF tolerances when it went off", would not look very good on a 1261...