Every warning the Era and the LX 10K can raise is listed in one setup menu, with a single line of explanation each. That is fine as a reference and useless in the air, where the question is not "what is this setting called" but "why is the screen red, and what do I do about it". This article answers the second question.
The warning list is identical on both instruments, so everything below applies equally to an Era and to an LX 10K. The Colibri X carries the same list, in the same menu, with the same behaviour.
What a warning looks like
A warning is a red WARNING box drawn over whatever page you were on. It is deliberately impossible to ignore and deliberately impossible to miss the type of, because the first job of the display is to tell you which of several very different problems you have. The list of which warnings are enabled lives in Setup > Warnings. The six named warnings are tick-boxes and every one can be switched off, which is the source of most "my instrument never warned me" reports. Go through the list once, on the ground, and decide each line on purpose.
The list you can switch
Audio
Not a warning in itself — the master switch for whether any audio warning plays. Turn this off and every other warning below becomes a silent red square; pilots switch it off during a noisy avionics debug and forget. What to do: leave it on. If a particular warning is annoying you, switch that warning off, not the audio for all of them.
Inputs
Covers every warning driven by an external micro-switch on the inputs interface. The interface takes five switches, and the functions that produce warnings are the gear and airbrake inputs.
The gear warning fires when:
- The gear is detected out more than 10 minutes after take-off and more than 500 m above the take-off point.
- The gear is not out, you are below 200 m, within 5 km of the take-off point, and more than 5 minutes into the flight.
- You are outlanding — airbrakes out, below 600 m QFE, more than 5 km from take-off — and the gear is not out. This case needs the airbrake switch fitted as well.
The airbrake warning fires when the airbrakes are out during the first 10 minutes of flight, which is to say during the launch and the tow.
What to set: every input function has a straight and an inverse variant. Straight triggers when the switch is made, inverse when it is released — inverse is usually what an airbrake microswitch wants. Get this backwards and the instrument warns you about the one configuration that is correct.
Flarm
Displays warnings sent by a connected FLARM device. The warning page pops up over whatever you were doing, including a setup menu, and names the object type in words — SKYDIVER 12 O'CLOCK ABOVE — alongside relative direction, relative altitude, distance and an angle from the horizon on a blue-and-brown scale.
What to do: look outside, in the direction stated. The screen exists to point your eyes, not to hold them.
Airspace
Warns about an impending airspace infringement, based on the loaded .cub files and the two distance limits below.
What to do: know which boundary you are near before you decide whether to descend, turn or ask. The academy article on airspace covers the classifications.
Stall
Warns when indicated airspeed falls to the stall speed you have configured. The speed comes from Setup > Glider > Airspeed, where VS1 is your stall speed and also the start of the green arc on the speed scale.
What to set: VS1 for your glider, at the reference mass. Background in airspeeds and angle of attack.
The stall warning knows one number: indicated airspeed against your configured VS1. It knows nothing about your bank angle or your ballast, and the real stall speed rises with both. In a tightening turn at low level it will not save you. Fly the margin yourself.
Vne
Warns when indicated airspeed reaches VNE, the never-exceed speed, set in the same airspeed menu that defines VNO, the top of the green arc.
What to set: the figures from your flight manual, not the ones from a similar glider. VNE also falls with altitude on many types; the instrument warns at one number.
Max. altitude
A pilot-set altitude ceiling. Useful for an airspace lid you must stay under, for an oxygen limit, or for a local rule. What to set: a value below the limit, in the same altitude datum (QNH or QFE) the ceiling is defined in. Setting it exactly at the lid gives you a warning at the moment you have already busted it.
The three airspace numbers
Three of the entries in the warnings menu are not warnings at all but the parameters that shape the airspace warning:
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
AS vertical limit | Vertical distance from the airspace at which the warning appears |
AS horizontal limit | Horizontal distance from the airspace at which the warning appears |
AS button value | How long a warning for that particular airspace stays muted after you acknowledge it |
The limits are a trade. Set them large and you get warned constantly on a busy day near a controlled zone, and you will start dismissing warnings reflexively, which is the actual danger. Set them small and the warning arrives with no room to act. Tune them to the airspace you genuinely fly in, not to the worst case.
AS button value is the one most worth thinking about. It is the length of your own silence, and it applies to that airspace only.
What the FLARM warning is telling you
A FLARM alarm is not one level, it is three, and the instrument conveys the difference by tempo rather than by text.
| Level | Time to impact | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| First | 13 to 18 seconds | Warning page appears; steady beeping and a flashing direction cone at the same rate; the voice module names the object's position |
| Second | 9 to 12 seconds | The same, with the beeping and the flashing noticeably faster |
| Third | 0 to 8 seconds | The same again, at the highest rate of beeping and flashing |
The rate is the information. If you only ever notice that a warning is happening and never that it has escalated, you are reading half of it. More on the underlying logic in how FLARM works.
The screen says this, it means that
| On screen | It means |
|---|---|
Red WARNING box, message about stall speed | IAS has fallen to your configured VS1 |
Red WARNING box, message about never-exceed speed | IAS has reached your configured VNE |
Red WARNING box naming an airspace | You are within the vertical or horizontal limit of that airspace |
Red WARNING box about gear or airbrakes | An inputs warning: configuration out of place for the phase of flight |
Red WARNING box about maximum altitude | You have reached the ceiling you set yourself |
| FLARM warning page over any other page | A FLARM device has sent an alarm; the object type and clock position are on screen |
Red cross over the screen, GPS DATA INVALID | No GPS fix. Check the antenna has a clear view of the sky and wait |
Warnings that are really settings
Three complaints arrive regularly that are not faults at all.
"The vario has gone silent." Almost always one of the Vario/SC settings, not a failure. Vario silence is a band around zero in which no tone is produced. SC silence is the same idea while in speed-command mode. Max circling speed silences the vario above a set speed when in SC mode. And SC mode itself decides how the instrument switches: Manual by the stick button, Speed above a threshold, or Circling — which detects a turn only after a sustained 5° per second for 8 straight seconds. At a typical 12° per second that is roughly a third of a circle, so a brief silence at the start of a climb is the design working, not the instrument sulking.
"It never warned me about the airspace." Check three things in order: that the airspace warning is enabled at all, that a .cub file is loaded and selected as active, and that the file has not expired. An out-of-date airspace file is worse than none, because it is confidently wrong about boundaries that have since moved. See database hygiene and the seasonal routine in firmware and database season check.
"It keeps warning me about the gear." If an input is configured for a gear or airbrake switch that was never actually wired, or wired straight where it should be inverse, the instrument is faithfully reporting a state that does not exist. Either wire the switch properly or clear the function from Setup > Inputs. Do not silence the Inputs category to fix one miswired switch — you lose the other one too.
Symptom, cause, fix
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| No audio on any warning | Audio switched off in Setup > Warnings | Turn it back on; disable individual warnings instead. |
| Airspace warnings constantly, everywhere | AS vertical limit or AS horizontal limit too generous | Reduce them to match the airspace you actually fly in. |
| Airspace warning silent after one acknowledgement | AS button value set long | Shorten it. It applies per airspace. |
| Stall warning in normal cruise | VS1 set too high, or set for the wrong glider | Correct VS1 in Setup > Glider > Airspeed. |
| Gear warning on every flight | Input configured straight where it should be inverse | Switch the function to its inverse variant. |
| Gear warning on outlanding never appears | Airbrake switch not fitted | That case requires the airbrake input to be present. |
| Vario silent in the first part of a climb | Circling not yet detected — it needs 5°/s for 8 s | Expected. Use the manual SC switch if you want it sooner. |
| Vario silent around zero | Vario silence band | Narrow it in Setup > Vario/SC. |
GPS DATA INVALID on the ground | Antenna under carbon, or a cold first fix | Give it sky and time; if it persists, check the antenna installation. |
| No FLARM warnings at all | Flarm disabled, or no FLARM connected | Check the setting, then the FLARM port and the FLARM's own power. |
Where to go next
- Firmware and databases: the Era and LX 10K download pages.
- Getting the instrument configured in the first place: Era setup and first flight.
- Theory behind the numbers being warned about: airspeeds, angle of attack, airspace and how FLARM works.
- Anything that does not match this article: your dealer first, then LX support.