They are very good low tech strategic tools, would not use them to navigate through embedded cells, but excellent for giving convective activity a wide berth (50nm).
RobertL18C wrote:
They are very good low tech strategic tools, would not use them to navigate through embedded cells, but excellent for giving convective activity a wide berth (50nm).
Yes true but if the aim is to maintain 50nm from something that randomly pop up/down with 10min half-lifecycle you need:
- 300kts speed to go inside with complete understanding of what is going on in/out and exactly where/when
- 150kts speed to stay on one side with vague understanding of what is going left/right
Most GA types have yellow arcs at 130kts when it’s bumpy, so even with 100k$ real-time radar they may fail that task
Even if they can see the future, it just pure luck to get out alive given GA speed limits, if you are at the wrong spots you are dead whatever the screen tells you and whatever you do with the stick 
I think Jets do 400kts speeds, that’s their key advantage and out of jail card, I think just altering their heading left/right +/-20deg every 1min to maintain comfortable ride will get them out of the mess even without storm scopes or weather radars, I did not test this strategy but the numbers looks right to me
My 2 cents to add here is that I have found myself right within embedded CBs a couple of times (in the tropics in Malaysia and also in the UK and Central Europe) where the Stormscope WX500 had not indicated anything. As soon as there was some visible lighting discharge, the Stormscope surely showed them.
WX500 is pretty reliable in the sense that if there are discharges (rather uncomfortably around me), they are definitely indicative of CBs or TCUs and you don’t want to go there but you can’t assume that if there are no discharges that there won’t be any CBs or TCUs.
I would still want to have a WX500 to avoid the majority of CBs and TCUs. I flew around Southeast Asia for around 5 years where one needs to expect CBs and TCUs at any time/place in the afternoons and the WX500 was of enormous help, for both strategic and tactical avoidance, especially useful if the CBs are not frontal.
I would never remove my wx500. It is very reliable in picking up strikes, and you definitely do not want to go where it is showing them. It gets the distance wrong; usually it shows the stuff a lot closer than it is.
Peter the question I have is does your ADF reflect what you see on the Storm scope ? Having spent the best part of 5000 hours using the best weather radar on the market I have frequently found the ADF needle swinging towards the indicated thunderstorms.
An ADF may well swing towards a TS which is constantly striking, but there is no way it will pick up sparse strikes. The long wave radiation it is looking for needs to be more or less continuous. A lightning bold produces a broad spectrum (from tens of kHz all the way to, I would guess from the voltages involved, hard x-rays) but only for a brief moment.
Airliners have radar but AIUI no sferics detection.
