AdamZ said:
My only experience is at KMIV. If they just offered advisories fine. But IMHO the folks at KMIV think and act like they are a tower and lieterally try and run the show. It can be a pain in the butt and create confusion. Anyone with different experience at KMIV should feel free to chime in. Perhaps other fields are different.
MIV is precisely what I had in mind, Adam.
I remember one woman there who insisted on reading the entire current METAR to every pilot who called Millville Radio. Talk about using up bandwidth that pilots could have used to self announce.
It also is confusing. At MIV after your initial call up they ususally tell you to announce midfield on the downwind. Some pilots (incorrectly, I think) interpret that to mean that's the only announcement thay have to make.
FSS manning CTAF may have been useful at one time, but it seems to me to be useless and confusing these days...
They get snotty at MIV sometimes as well. I flew in there a few years ago with a CFI to work on something which I no longer recall. I had called for a briefing and was told that 14-32 was closed (I think they were repainting the runway markings).
On my initial call up the briefer said the winds favored 14. I asked him to confirm that 14-32 was open because the briefer had told me it was closed. Which I thought was a reasonabl request. He came back and snottily said "I wouldn't have told you to use it if it were closed". Sheeesh. He could have just said it reopened a half hour ago.
I paid him back, though. I taxiied to 14 for t/o, looked for traffic, and announced I was departing 14, closed traffic. The same briefer came back on and asked me if I was remaining in the pattern. I snottily said "I wouldn't have told you closed traffic if I wasn't going to remain in the pattern".
Dead silence on the radio. CFI sitting next to me doubled up in laughter.