FLARM in the USA question

Hi Darryl,
I was responding primarily to this thread.
However, the term Flarm seems to be used generically when there are two distinctly different systems.
BTW, I spent all day updating my FLARM and other software systems. Seems that using a Mac to download files and install them on memory cards introduces bugs. When I used a Windows machine to do these tasks all the upgrades worked perfectly.
So much for Macs being the SUPERIOR machines!

On Friday, May 4, 2018 at 6:24:50 PM UTC-7, Tom BravoMike wrote:
(...)

He was reading a FLARM manual. PowerFlarm is not the same as Flarm.
It's not a "type of Flarm", it's quite different. Different
frequencies. Very incompatible.

Which practically means that if a US pilot wants to take his glider to the other continents (for a competition, long vacation, temporary job assignment), his PowerFlarm becomes useless. However, ADS-B 1090 ES continues to work and will be compatible. Yet another good reason to wish we had a FLARM-similar software using the ADS-B transmissions (a deep sigh... Darryl says it would be too expensive to engineer and maintain for the small soaring community).

I'll give a long reply but basically I'm not convinced there is any real problem here that justify worrying about things.

A pilot can't bring their legacy FLARM unit to the USA because its not FCC approved and not legal to operate, and there may be other reasons like optimization of the old units to work well in ISM band, etc. A PowerFLARM purchased in one country might not be able to be moved to another because the units might have slightly different RF hardware/tuning depending on the country of delivery. Remember earlier USA PowerFLARM units being recalled for service and having RF component changes on the boards to improve performance in USA ISM band frequencies. I'm sure where that is at, I don't need to move my PowerFLARM between countries so have not checked, if somebody is wanting to do that they should check with FLARM or their OEM provider. And where things may not work well I would support FLARM geo-blocking the units so pilots are not flying around unknowingly with poorly working units. In practice I suspect for things like international contests or holidays that if it's needed then sorting out a local FLARM unit is not that hard amongst all the other things the pilot has to do. I want us to focus on what is important, like reducing glider midair collision risks, it seems worrying about moving units between geographies is going down a not very important rat hole..

ADS-B is not automatically better here. As I've been trying to point out in other threads "ADS-B" is a marketing term and talking about "ADS-B" without specifics may not mean much. And here we back into again what specs are used for GPS quality are in that ADS-B Source.

FLARM gets to use specific commodity GPS technology in their product by careful engineering and understanding the chipset performance. They don't have to interoperate across any possible GPS receiver performance. I would not assume that a FLARM like systems layered on top of ADS-B Out using God knows what GPS receiver is going to work acceptably. It might, but do you want a rogue "FLARM" glider flying in a huge start gaggle broadcasting wonky position data? So we are maybe back then to relying on aviation GPS standards like TSO-C145c or TSO-C199/TABS. And then what is deployed in gliders and other aircraft might start to change by geography. I'd probably not want to trust any old ADS-B based systems that accepted SIL=0/unknown quality GPS location data. If somebody was so financially brave (==crazy) to want to develop FLARM like capabilities on top of ADS-B Out, doing so on top of TABS or better probably makes a lot of sense.... and there is no TABS standards or adoption at all outside the USA yet (ironically though because the effort to do that kinda started in Europe). Me... I'm not holding my breath for anything else, I'll expect I'll be happy to keep buying whatever FLARM products end up becoming available in the USA.

On Friday, May 4, 2018 at 7:44:05 PM UTC-7, wrote:
Hi Darryl,
I was responding primarily to this thread.
However, the term Flarm seems to be used generically when there are two distinctly different systems.
BTW, I spent all day updating my FLARM and other software systems. Seems that using a Mac to download files and install them on memory cards introduces bugs. When I used a Windows machine to do these tasks all the upgrades worked perfectly.
So much for Macs being the SUPERIOR machines!

I'm trying to avoid confusion by talking about Legacy FLARM and PowerFLARM.... "FLARM" is a family of products including from OEM licenses, an underlying technology and radio protocol, and the company. So it's going to be confusing unless people are careful what the are referring to. This whole thread stated with a confused question because of confusion about these names. And again, all FLARM (the company and OEM) products, at least those sold/supported within any geography, are *fully* compatible.

On your update issue. You could have asked me I spent part of last weekend helping folks do PowerFLARM firmware updates :-) That is a know issue, discussed in r.a.s. in the past, caused by the somewhat hidden ._* files that Macs put on FAT32 filesystems to emulate their legacy filesystem file "resource forks". FLARM really should fix this so it does not happen.

Hope to see you flying this weekend.