I am afraid I posted to the wrong audience, because you dont even know that
most of flarm units in europe do not have the capability to be reprogrammed
with a memory card.
You have to use a PC with a rs232 serial cable, to connect to the RJ45 plug
of the Flarm unit.
Most people do not even know what the heck this means.
I fear these people that may fly around for weeks, or months, with a
non-working flarm.
The collision avoidance works on the principle of cooperation, as with Flarm
here.
If you dont have a working unit, my working unit will not work too.
If I crash against a glider and the pilot says "my flarm did not say
anything.." and we discover it was not updated, you bet your home, wife and
kids that I shall sue the swiss company all the way. What they are doing is
criminal.

There are only two reasons why we dont have the firmware now, with a
blackout pending in 45 days.
A) Firmware is not yet ready and debugged. If this is the case, since we are
talking of SAFETY, the best thing to do is to postpone by some months the
entire matter.
B) Firmware is ready, but flarm is dealing with its Tracking server and
currently it is negotiating with the people of OGN and their network of
receive stations round the world that will be soon obscured at the end of
march. Yes, this is the missing point. Nothing to do with safety.

But let's calm down please, no reason to argue..


wrote in message
...

On Sunday, February 22, 2015 at 2:24:44 PM UTC-6, Mike Schumann wrote:
On Sunday, February 22, 2015 at 12:36:15 PM UTC-5, Andy Blackburn wrote:
Any device used for collision avoidance will have some of its critical
capabilities dependent on both aircraft in a potential collision
situation having the same algorithms on board or chaos (or worse) might
ensue. Making the update mandatory and taking non-updated units out of
service is the only way to ensure safe and reliable performance of the
entire system.

You might quibble a bit about the lead time, but updating the firmware
is really not very complicated. I tried a different firmware version (or
different config file) practically every day at the 15m nationals last
year as I was trying to work out a PCAS problem and a interface issue
with my LX 9000. All you need is the firmware and a memory stick.

It's not that hard.

It will all work out in the end.

Remain calm.

9B

It is NOT impossible to design system upgrades so that they are backward
compatible with older units that are still in use. It is probably much
more convenient for FLARM to use this approach so they don't need to deal
with the complexity of having multiple different device versions that need
to talk to each other. These kind of shortcuts make one question whether
FLARM really has the potential to be a VERY niche product for a small
subset of the aviation market.

Couple that with POWERFLARM's inability to see UAT equipped ADS-B OUT
equipped aircraft, either directly or via TIS-B retransmission from an
ADS-B ground station, raises some big questions on whether or not they
have really thought thru the whole collision avoidance picture in the US,
where the threat is not just other gliders, but also GA and airline
traffic.

I wish the Messr. Schumann and Suppards would just join hands and walk away,
far away from this forum. Maybe they can entertain each other with their
nonsense.