Originally Posted by
ncbull
I’m assuming SBD doesn’t have stars radar or fdio to input your information. If they don’t have the equipment they can’t get you flight following. Pick it up in the air.
This. The tower has to have the ability to input your info into the FDIO. If they can't do that, then you have to get it airborne.
It's not really connected whether the tower has a radar feed or not, although if the tower does have a radar display, it will also have FDIO, but you can have towers with FDIO but no radar.
A controller can terminate flight following at any time due to workload saturation. It's a non-essential service.