Originally Posted by
Crash one
Therefore their actual effectiveness is limited. In this day & age of high tec things in general it's a bit dissapointing that the mark one eyeball is still king of the hill. Is there any organisation looking at anything better?
If you want technological assistance in detecting other aircraft, you can do so with or without the cooperation of the other aircraft. Without it, you need a primary radar system, which is hopelessly expensive, heavy and power consuming.
So detection relies on cooperative systems, which means that everything to be detected must be equipped with the same sort of technology -- it's pointless for 50% of aircraft to be equipped with one system and 50% with the other.
Within the class of cooperative systems, there are again two possibilities. Either the detected aircraft needs to respond to interrogations from the detector -- which is how TCAS works in detecting transponder-equipped aircraft, or it needs to broadcast its presence (including its position) on a regular basis -- something called ADS-B.
A number of different technologies have been proposed and evaluated for the communications part (datalink) of ADS-B. While there are minor differences between them, it essentially comes down to picking a frequency and choosing a power budget. None of the technologies is fundamentally cheaper or less power hungry than another. The bulk of the purchase cost, as always in avionics, comes from development and certification costs. Thus whatever is chosen, if you turn it into an international standard, it's probably going to cost a 4-figure sum.
One of the datalinks, which will almost certainly be chosen as the standard for ADS-B in Australia, Europe and for larger aircraft in the USA, is called 1090ES. That is the datalink over which the Mode S transponder works, and virtually every recent Mode S transponder is capable of doing ADS-B if you plug an appropriate GPS into it.
Thus as well as responding to TCAS and aiding detection by ground radar systems, the Mode S transponder will permit you, in years to come, to participate in ADS-B. There are already desktop ADS-B detectors out there (e.g. Kinetic's SBS-1), and it's only a matter of time before they become available for cockpit use.
The bottom line is that if you want help from technology in detecting other aircraft, you need to get behind the move towards universal equipage with Mode S, even if you don't like the way that the CAA is approaching the issue.