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

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.