UK PPL schools tend to teach people to call up everybody possible so they call up e.g. Goodwood (which is just a grass strip with a FISO or A/G i.e. a “man with a radio”) for a BS. Completely pointless. When I did the radio exam, the guy told me: call up only those you need to call up and tell them only what they need to know.
If there was something going on at Goodwood (e.g. an air display) then it should come up in the notams if it’s relevant. You must get notams along the route, to pick up “prohibited” areas which while rare do pop up in the summer and are strictly enforced. In any case Goodwood has an ATZ and you can get busted for busting that 
In Germany you get a traffic service more or less automatically if you bother to talk to FIS, although many only “log in” to FIS to ask about a wheter a specific ED-R is active and then leave the frequency again.
All FIS units have radar AFAIK and will use it to warn you of traffic and airspace ahead…IF their workload permits it. On a sunny Saturday in summer, don’t expect too much apart from a squawk and the QNH.
A big plus are the relatively large areas covered by the individual unit. I must have missed the most recent reorganisation though because I only read a few days ago on EuroGA that Bremen Information no longer exists…
A few years back – I think two or three years ago – a bulletin was published that, although under a basic service the pilots were officially responsible for seeing and avoiding, those controllers providing a radar backed, basic service could be expected to provide traffic information if the proximity was likely to lead to a conflict and the controller workload wasn’t too high to allow such monitoring.
When this came out, I pointed out – on the other forum – that this could lead to pilots believing that a basic service offers more than they are actually receiving. I think this near miss underlines that sentiment….
@MedEwok Bremen are now Langen – there is no Munich Information, no Bremen Information – just Langen. The sectors they control have been adjusted with effect 01 April, I believe. I was fortunate, I had a tour of their facilities in Bremen the week before the FIS moved to Langen…..
I was very surprised to see that I was supposed to call Langen in the Munich area the other day.
Why call for a basic service? Up north there’s areas where there’s no FMC, and London/Scottish can tell you which parachuting areas/glider clubs are active, and have a much more powerful transmitter than the various ATISes so you can get the QNH before you get near a CAS shelf (thanks to exorbitant fees charged by Ofcom in their flawed ‘opportunity cost’ charging model, many ATISes now transmit with very little power, and given many aviation antennas are compromises, power does help).
Timothy wrote:
rather than use a combination of FMC (listening squawk) and monitoring 121.5?
Yes, fully agree if you have two listen comms !
But just make sure you press transmit for any zone transits you are doing it on FMC freq (guys who own CAS do monitor both FMC & 121.5 and as bonus they are just nearby but they tend to appreciate CAS transit calls on FMC and they like to leave 121.5 for serious chats 
)
@Peter and @Off_field thanks for the advice and the explanation it all seems very complex especially the "cover your backside English, mind it can be worse in French.
I never ask for a basic service, but sometimes I am given one.
One example would be approaching controlled airspace for a transit. I ask for the transit but not for any particular service outside controlled airspace. When they come back and clear me for the transit they often say “basic service outside controlled airspace” which covers the few minutes before I cross the boundary and they say “now entering controlled airspace, radar control service”.
Another is on my frequent route of Enstone to White Waltham passing overhead Oxford. I call Oxford to advise transiting their overhead (as there is usually inbound IFR/training traffic) and they usually give me a basic service, although I don’t ask for it.
I cannot envisage a scenario where I would ask for a basic service. Most UK PPL R/T is just blindly following what was taught with no real understanding of why.
I never ask for a basic service, but sometimes I am given one.
Very often, one asks some radar unit for a Traffic Service but gets only a BS, due to
it all seems very complex
It is easy enough. Just plan for Class G, of which there is plenty in the UK. When I started to fly in France (2003) I was VFR only and I thought France was like this, so I avoided the (often almost impossible to decipher) French CAS. The UK CAS structure is much more obvious on the chart. I do recommend avoiding the “2300ft” stuff around the London TMA because there are too many gotchas. I won’t fly there anymore myself.
In south scotland there aren’t really any listening squawks, Scottish info I don’t believe can offer anything above basic service.
Not true. Today I got all the three when going from Dublin to the Orkneys, Basic service first and last, traffic service then and conflicting service when high enough in the middle.
conflicting service
traffic service
basic service
