On Thu, 14 Mar 2019 14:04:15 -0700, Paul Remde wrote:

The posts recommending the use of OGN are very interesting. The
customer I'm working with is not interested in having the aircraft
positions available over the internet, but our soaring club is.

Getting our club members to invest in PowerFLARM units or ADS-B Out has
been tough. The OGN Trackers look like a nice, low-cost alternative.

OGN in its original form was just a network of software-defined receivers
running on RaspberryPis that picked up FLARM transmissions, and passed
the data from them over the Internet to a webserver. This is what you
connect to on order to see all FLARM-equipped gliders and aircraft in
range of the network of receivers.

Since then a similar network, FlightAware, has appeared. It works in a
similar way to FLARM but it not compatible with it, but links have been
set up so that its now possible to co-locate OGN and FlightAware ground
stations and cross-link them so that, IIRC, FLARM traffic is broadcast to
FlightAware equipped aircraft and vice versa.

However, since they are transmitters, wouldn't a radio license be
required? Also, wouldn't F.C.C. approval be needed for any devices?

AFAIK its still quite possible to operate a pure OGN network with all
ground stations in receive-only mode.

OGN is only practical because, although a typical FLARM system only has
an operating radius of 4-5 km, an OGN receiver with a decent, well-placed
antenna can track FLARM-equipped gliders over a much larger distance,
typically 30km or so.

Go he http://live.glidernet.org around midday in the UK or Europe
to see what the system looks like when gliders are operating. Or look at
NZ or Australia about 12 hours earlier/later.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org