midair in Bay Area Nov 7

On 11/17/2020 12:01 PM, Ramy wrote:
On Tuesday, November 17, 2020 at 8:06:00 AM UTC-8, Dan Marotta wrote:
On 11/16/20 6:10 PM, Ramy wrote:
One of the flarms was inop due to expired firmware.
I wonder how many personal injury attorneys saw that statement...

--
Dan
5J
Flarm is voluntary installation after all.
The pilot with the operating flarm was not injured.
The point here is not to put blame.
Every year I hear of multiple expired firmwares, including that very same day he wasn’t the only one.
There is an awareness and confusion issue which we need to address.
I am planning to always have the latest firmware on a USB stick with me (without my config file!) and periodically ask my buddies at the airport if they upgraded the firmware this year, if not, will upgrade it for them on the spot.

Ramy


Well this makes me angry. You buy a $2000 device for safety reasons and
they disable it behind your back just because you are late on the
firmware update?

I know they improve the algorithms over time, so it is a good idea to do
the update. But since the requirement is to update a year since the
last update, the versions in operation by different pilots on the same
day are not the same, they might be up to a year apart. So they must
keep them compatible. And as far as I know they mostly improve the
algorithm interpreting the data, not the format of the data sent out.
Thus old firmware is far better than the thing not working at all, for
both transmission and reception, for the safety of both the pilot with
the old firmware and the other pilots around.

When the battery in my smoke alarm gets weak, it emits an occasional
short beep to remind me. FLARM could emit occasional sounds (different
from the collision warming sound) to remind you that it's time to update
the firmware. And leave it at that.