Originally Posted by
PaulisHome
Mode S. ADSB. Flarm. Pilot Aware. Now this. Too much confusion over standards merely leads to lower overall takeup....
I absolutely agree. Taking ADSB and Mode S out of the question for a minute, the problem we as an hobby and private aviation community is that we have had to opt for closed solutions because that was the only choice. I don't blame people for doing that, but their trailblazing is blindly leading the rest of the community down a dead end.
FLARM is completely closed. In fact they take active steps to both encrypt and obfuscate their traffic information in the hope that it will force us to buy their hardware at massively inflated costs. I understand that people have got to make a living, and that we as a community do tend to have reasonable budgets, but the level of cost vs RRP is far too large in my opinon.
PilotAware looked great at the start, a real solution to breaking the FLARM monopoly, but unfortunately their promise of making their protocol open has evaporated. They have never published it, and they ignore requests for information. In conclusion they are using the same predatory tactic as FLARM.
So as I said above, I quite agree that we don't need
another protocol but instead an
open protocol both in terms of anyone being free to implement it but also anyone being free to comment, expand or suggest changes to without having a manufacturer having ultimate veto. Unfortunately it seems that neither FLARM nor PA wish to take that step.
Originally Posted by
PaulisHome
....there's no point if people are flying around with different systems.
The OpenFLARM system supports FLARM receive 'out of the box' ie doesn't need an £800 add on to make it work (like PA does). It will be receive only at the outset, purely because there are parts of the FLARM protocol that have not yet been reverse engineered and we do not wish to risk safety by transmitting data without understanding what it does.
We are quite happy to support PA's PI3 protocol if they wish to start talking to us. We are also quite happy to give them our information so that they can integrate with our system.
And just for the record, any OpenFLARM system can transmit and receive data from any other OpenFLARM, be that aircraft or ground station relay.
Originally Posted by
PaulisHome
If they want to use something that is 'open' what's wrong with ADSB?
Yes, I also agree, having every aircraft running Mode S/ADSB would be a great solution. However as of today how many hobby and private pilots - the sort of people who would buy a FLARM or PA - actually carry the equipment to transmit it? In my experience, virtually none. The approval process to actually having transmit capability, ie to be seen yourself, is prohibitively expensive and those that can afford it are likely to be 'up high' and out of the way.
My conclusion therefore is that it is of limited use in the real (hobby and private) world at the moment, and that is the root of the problem. Any system needs critical mass, you end up playing 'chicken and egg', and when the cost of entry is so high it prevents that cycle being broken.
OpenFLARM on the other hand is a £50 punt, less than most of us pay for 0.5 hours I would expect, and just plugs in an goes. An external GPS receiver for your tablet costs more than that, so even without the collision avoidance it is a useful device.
Back on ADSB, the time I can actually see it being useful is in the vicinity of a large airfield where light aircraft are mixing it with bigger stuff. There is a solution for that built in to the OpenFLARM protocol where a ground station at the airfield can retransmit ADSB or Mode S data for this exact purpose and that data can be shared between devices in flight in order to increase range.
Also please take a look at the video on ADS-B linked from the OpenFLARM site. It is a of a presentation given at the DEFCON hacker convention which points out some massive security weaknesses in ADS-B. Quite scary stuff when you start thinking about it. I am actually split on my opinion on this. Part of me says hopefully the aviation community as a whole will wake up and fix these issues, either by extending the standard or replacing it altogether. The other part of me says that if that does happen it is likely to make the approval process even more difficult and put the technology even further out of reach.