Justin Couch ,
For most of the standards you talk about there are alternatives.
Don't like Android? Use Linux or Windows. Some of you examples seem
obsolete too. Firewire? Haven't seen that in quite a while. As I
understand it the wi-fi thing is a straight out patent fight. Not so with
Flarm.
The Flarm problem is that to be at all useful all such devices must
conform to the same standard in the rf scheme and the transmission protocol.
This was initially unencrypted and only when a credible competitor
appeared did Flarm institute the encryption.
Now consider what would have happened had Flarm announced on first
release of their system that they intended to enforce an effective
monopoly by encrypting the transmissions? Or announced that they
would do so in future? Would the takeup have been as rapid?
Would a competitor immediately have appeared or announced intention,
before the installed base of Flarms got large, to offer an
unencrypted transmission protocol? Maybe several competitors? Would
the IGC or a National gliding body (maybe a non Swiss one with
a large number of pilots) have said - that's a good idea but we're
not paying those chocolate makers and yodellers a royalty* - here's
our open standard?
The IGC publishes a standard for IGC certified Flight Recorders and
verifies that any manufacturer's product meets it. There were some
shenanigans with that too, though. As I said, people send me stuff.
Another gliding comparison would be if one of the major manufacturers
had developed or now bought the rights to CS22 which gliders must be
certified to in most countries and had the ability to change it at
will and demand a licence fee. How many other manufacturer's
would there be? From reading between the lines one non European
manufacturer already ran up against Germany Inc. when trying to
certify a glider.
I really despise anti competitive behaviour and the people who
indulge in it. In the Flarm case encryption introduces unnecessary
complexity and risk to protect a market. The privacy argument is a
mere fig leaf for anti competitive behaviour. ADSB and mode S have
unique codes for each aircraft and are easy to eavesdrop. What next,
flight plans and Sartimes are breaches of privacy? Who was it said
around 15 years ago: "Privacy, there isn't any. Get used to it."?
I can't see what Flarm are worried about. If they don't encrypt and
have licence agreements those contracts still stand until one of the
licencees develops his own source code, circuit boards and hardware
and uses that instead of the Flarm equivalents. Given the market
penetration of Flarm and the near saturation of the market this may
not even happen. The licencees didn't get the source code AFAIK
anyway just the hex.
For the record I was offered a licence to manufacture Flarm in 2004-
2005. I forget which and I'm too lazy to look it up. As it used a
very similar GPS to that we were designing into the B500 system, my
German distributor suggested I talk to them about it. I did so and
they made the offer. I even did the research to find the correct
frequency to use in Australia. I wasn't really interested in
manufacturing the things here, nor selling them as I thought they
would be useless unless there was near universal adoption, I'm not
fond of mandates
and customer support was likely to be onerous.
Adrian and I had scoped out the possibilities for a similar system in
2000. Transmitting GPS positions for traffic awareness is an obvious
thing and not patentable. We actually decided how many bits in the
message (funny how we came to the same number as Flarm)
and how often it needed to transmit. Consulted Adrian's son, Peter, a
graduate Electronic engineer about the rf side and he suggested we
might get 5 to 6km range on the 2.4Ghz band. Good enough for a
demonstration we thought. We had other things to do and getting
decent range would likely involve the bureaucratic nightmare of
getting a specific frequency allocated. We were somewhat bemused by
Flarm's severely limited range when we heard about it.
* I was told by Paul Raber of Aerograf fame, a Swiss, that the Swiss
thought that is the German attitude to technology originating in
Switzerland. May have changed.
Mike
Borgelt Instruments - design & manufacture of quality soaring
instrumentation since 1978
www.borgeltinstruments.com
tel: 07 4635 5784 overseas: int+61-7-4635 5784
mob: 042835 5784 : int+61-42835 5784
P O Box 4607, Toowoomba East, QLD 4350, Australia
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