FLARM in Stealth Mode at US 15M/Standard Nationals - Loved It!

Thanks Hank. That is a pretty solid paper.

After reading the paper and hearing of the sophistication with which certain teams are trying to maximize their signal reception and minimize their transmition (covering antennas, custom antennas, powering on/off, amplifiers, turning on and off stealth mode, etc...) I have changed my position.

That is just ridiculous! Im surprised that this was not penalized when discovered. Some of these act are fairly shameful. Reminds me of a guy in sailing using an illegal carbon fibre deck (saving 50 lbs) in a one design class that required fiberglass. Pure cheating. Completely unsportsmanlike.

Either we need to all use the EXACT SAME equipment (a nightmare to enforce) or we should level the playing field and limit the data to the minimum needed to ensure safety (STEALTH v2, more later).

I would suggest "3 km", no ID, altitude only. No climb rate, no heading, no speed, etc. I think 2 km (1.2x miles, suggested in article) is not enough for a head on situation at 120 kts. Maybe even 5 km. But that exact window distance is for others to decide and a fairly minor point as long as it is at least 3km.

Overall, based on the article, I think taking advantage and manipulating FLARM data has already gone out of control.

- Ill formally support the newly recommended, next generation (V2) Stealth mode configuration (not the current configuration that may slightly limit situation awareness of close in gliders that are not currently a collision threat).

I think that confuguration change is quite easy to do and very important.

I hope the IGC -AND- SSA (and other countries) make this rule change quickly and together.

Sean
7T

On Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 8:55:24 AM UTC-4, wrote:
On Friday, August 7, 2015 at 10:49:31 PM UTC-4, John Cochrane wrote:
So we should impose stealth mode now because somebody might some day write some killer software that might let people know where thermals are and this might turn out to be a bad thing? I've "written specs" for lots of stuff too, like thermal detectors. No reality yet.

I think we need to get back to a simple principle: Let's see if something is really a problem before we start passing rules against it.

Surely, you guys who want to impose stealth mode can come up with some real, serious, documented problem that real flarms today are causing, not just hypothetical problems of hypothetical future software?

By then we'll all have FAA mandated ADSB displays of all traffic, super cheap drone anti-collision technology showing us where the thermaling birds are, and so on.

John Cochrane

I'll provide here a portion of a report written by one of the major rules thinkers without attribution as I do not have his OK to do so.
What's the problem
Range of Flarm now gives competitors the opportunity of identifying, locating and assessing the climb rate of competitors over 20km away. This has evolved with the production of better Flarm electronics (Powerflarm) and a better understanding of influence and importance of antenna location and design. Whilst the improved performance is most welcome as it now ensures that all installations are seeing and being seen at the important 2km range with much reduced blind spots(2km required for effective collision avoidance head to head), it has dramatically increased the tactical use by competition pilots.
Tactical benefits on task include being able to assess climb rate of others and identify where important pilots are in order to make improved strategic decisions. Even if the targets in view are not "tagged" they give important information for gliders behind to optimise routing and to ensure that if required a follower may ensure they fly the same route. Tactical benefit prior to start is even greater as it allows a full view of the start line area so it is clear where all the start gaggles are located, where key competitors are, whether they have started and sometimes what rate of climb is achieved in the first thermal on task.
It is arguable whether this sort of tactical assistance diminishes the art of racing gliders. I believe it does but this is not the main thrust of this paper. Flarm in isolation is a great safety device that has rightly been encouraged to the position we find ourselves today where it is mandatory in all FAI Cat 1 events. However, it is now very clear from feedback from International competition pilots that the workload in gleaning the "necessary" tactical data from the Flarm device is diminishing or eliminating the apparent added safety that the underlying Flarm provides.
What are pilots doing:-
1 Spending way too much time scanning moving maps for tactical contact detail instead of look out
2 Spending way too much time "tagging" competitors instead of look out to improve tactical content
3 Turning their Flarm units on and off at will to avoid tactical benefit accruing to others
4 Blanking antennas to reduce or eliminate range to avoid tactical benefit accruing to others
5 Installing amplifiers to increase range even further
6 Utilising two port Flarm units with one send/receive and one receive only antenna to maximise the range received but eliminate or restrict transmit range.
7 Changing backwards and forwards from "stealth" to full ON mode to minimize tactical benefit accruing to others but maximising own benefit as required.
Whats the effect
1 Safety is significantly diminished due to significant head in cockpit time inputting and viewing the Flarm for maximum tactical benefit.
2 Following or "leaching" is much easier so the eternal problem of gaggling is further encouraged at the possible cost of safety.
3 It is much easier for pilots of lower skill level to fly at the same XC speed as the best pilots.
What's the solution

Please read and consider with an open mind.
UH

Seems like many of the procedures to enforce turning Flarm on and off or adjusting range are the same or similar to enforcing stealth mode, the primary difference being in one case you are ensuring they don't have too much range and in the other you are ensuring they don't have too little - log files, Flarm ground stations, etc have been proposed for both.

Also worth pondering - in a world with ADS-B we will ultimately end up in a world were stealth mode is effectively voluntary - like today only more so..

9B

Also - one of the main concerns coming out of Europe is OGN, which has cracked Flarm encryption and doesn't need to abide by Stealth protocols. This is mostly open source software and Flarm ground stations with high gain antennas have ranges many multiples of the airborne units. So enterprising pilots/teams can create situations where everyone else is flying around with 2km range and their's is effectively unlimited.

I've got all the components to build a Flarm Ground Station collected - so I can see what it's capable of.

We might have to search you for cell phones before you take off - and make you turn them in.

Stay tuned.

9B

On Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 12:48:19 PM UTC-4, Andy Blackburn wrote:
Also - one of the main concerns coming out of Europe is OGN, which has cracked Flarm encryption and doesn't need to abide by Stealth protocols. This is mostly open source software and Flarm ground stations with high gain antennas have ranges many multiples of the airborne units. So enterprising pilots/teams can create situations where everyone else is flying around with 2km range and their's is effectively unlimited.

Hey, maybe we're making this more complicated than necessary. The solution is to just ban FLARM in competition.

It's a big sky. My first experiences with FLARM over the past month have been good, but I'd been doing just fine without it for 50 years before then. Ironically, I suspect that having been warned of close encounters of which they weren't aware of until FLARM, most competitors would now be conditioned to be MUCH more alert and vigilant than ever before if they didn't have it.

And unlike online weather radar displays, it's not like one guy sneaking a FLARM unit into his glider will provide a competitive advantage, right?

Just trying to help. I look forward to hearing of 9B's experiments with FLARM ground stations and high-gain antennas.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
U.S.A.

In the spirit of out of the box thinking...

A radically simpler and non-technical arms race approach to this is simply to apply a "leech tax".

Since we are all scored on GPS traces it would be straightforward and operationally 100% automated to simply add 5-10 seconds to each pilot's time on course for every minute they spend climbing in a thermal that another glider found before them. You get no tax if you arrive within 20 seconds of pilots in the thermal ahead of you and a thermal remains "hot" from a tax perspective until 2 minutes after all the gliders arriving in front of you have left. You can set an upper limit of 5 or 10 minutes of added time or leave it unlimited. Scoring programs could also report leeching statistics for each pilot which would be interesting to see regardless.

That would certainly cut down on visual and electronic leeching and would encourage more pilots to lead out on course, reduced time spent scouting Flarm targets.

Depends on whether leeching is the main concern.

9B

On Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 3:21:06 PM UTC-4, Andy Blackburn wrote:
In the spirit of out of the box thinking...

A radically simpler and non-technical arms race approach to this is simply to apply a "leech tax".

That's the spirit, 9B! But that problem isn't using a thermal that another pilot found. If I spot someone a few miles away banked up at 60 degrees going up like smoke over Hillary Clinton's email servers, I shouldn't be penalized if I abandon 1 kt. at 1,200 feet and run for it.

On the other hand, if the well-known post-start-gate "towing" pattern is detected where the trailing pilot enters thermal a few wingspans directly behind the leader, levy the tax. Since this is all automated, set a threshold value between two gliders, say 1 to 2 minutes, after which it's assumed the second pilot did enough decision making that it's not leeching. And since this is all automated, if the software detects that the trailing pilot closed the gap during the previous run by a more skillful/lucky path, no penalty.

On Saturday, 8 August 2015 10:28:15 UTC-6, Andy Blackburn wrote:
Seems like many of the procedures to enforce turning Flarm on and off or adjusting range are the same or similar to enforcing stealth mode, the primary difference being in one case you are ensuring they don't have too much range and in the other you are ensuring they don't have too little - log files, Flarm ground stations, etc have been proposed for both.

Also worth pondering - in a world with ADS-B we will ultimately end up in a world were stealth mode is effectively voluntary - like today only more so.

9B
If the SSA Competition Rules Committee or Competition Committee decides that stealth mode is required at some level of contests and a rule is implemented the enforcement of the rule *MUST* be automated, just like airspace violations are checked within WINSCORE or SeeYou Competition.

Please do not put yet another level of burden on contest organizers.

On Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 12:51:17 PM UTC-4, Ron Gleason wrote:
On Saturday, 8 August 2015 10:28:15 UTC-6, Andy Blackburn wrote:
Seems like many of the procedures to enforce turning Flarm on and off or adjusting range are the same or similar to enforcing stealth mode, the primary difference being in one case you are ensuring they don't have too much range and in the other you are ensuring they don't have too little - log files, Flarm ground stations, etc have been proposed for both.

Also worth pondering - in a world with ADS-B we will ultimately end up in a world were stealth mode is effectively voluntary - like today only more so.

9B
If the SSA Competition Rules Committee or Competition Committee decides that stealth mode is required at some level of contests and a rule is implemented the enforcement of the rule *MUST* be automated, just like airspace violations are checked within WINSCORE or SeeYou Competition.

Please do not put yet another level of burden on contest organizers.

This was contemplated several years ago. In discussing what I called "US Stealth", I asked Urs at Flarm if the Flarm device could be put into Stealth and locked for a predetermined time so that a single verification, presumably during the practice period, could be done. He indicated that this was quite feasible. If Stealth in competition takes off, obviously scorers all over will want this quickly. This also avoids the problem of not being able to supply a complying log because of a failure.
UH