GrahamB wrote:Sooty25 wrote:Both FLARM and PAW are closed commercially controlled protocols so should be excluded.
I think you’ll find that PAW’s protocol, P3i, is openly published and available to all.
The annual licence you pay to PAW is for use of the proprietary software/hardware, not the protocol.
Warning: Personal Rant starting:
I think we get overly concerned with this aspect - in the computing world pretty much all private individuals and small business run on commercial standards - my guess is everyone on this forum runs something from Mr Gates or Mr Jobbs.... In that world formal open standards for communications do not have a good track record (if you've been in the computing industry in the 1980's you may have witnessed the massive amount of time, money and effort wasted on "Open Systems Interconnectivity" standards which never yielded a single practical system). There a mix of commercial (Windows / Ios) and de-facto standards (eg html) works just fine.
Flarm may be "closed", but it can easily be licenced - I sometimes think we would be a lot further on if, 10 years ago, the CAA/EASA had negotiated a licencing deal on Flarm. A proprietary standard has several advantages - it is much quicker to extend the standard as you have control, not multiple layers of committee's, and you can tailor it better - look at what Flarm can achieve vs ADSB on a fraction of the power. Since it's initial release Flarm has been extended to obstacle avoidance and is now being used for "avoid zones" for things like parachute dropping or drones, and (given the limitations of transmit power) is still IMHO the best traffic avoidance outside of full TCAS.
Seems to me we've ended up with another "camel*" here - as just one example why does ADSB need 1Mb data rates, which compromise receive and transmit at low power? Porting Flarm to a "safe" frequency & allowing for a modest increase in transmit power would have been easy - it already caters for US differences, we would have had choice from a dozen or more vendors, a more sophisticated traffic warning (Flarm data message contains more information than ADSB enabling this) & we'd be looking at shippings tens of thousands of units across the UK/EU/Aus not just a few thousand which brings down costs.
P3i is a great idea, but sadly not a single commercial supplier outside of PilotAware has taken it up, even just as a received protocol.
Rant off:
* As you all no doubt recall "a camel is a horse designed by a committee"