iConspicuity - Interoperability of Electronic Conspicuity Systems for General Aviation - Final event

Final Dissemination event of the EASA research Project “iConspicuity - Interoperability of Electronic Conspicuity Systems for General Aviation - Final dissemination event”
Date: 28/06/24
Read more: www.easa.europ...

[@ToumalRakesh]

I am very much in favor of general conspicuity of every airspace user, be that GA, UAVs, RC models, skydivers or anything else. And it is clear that ADS-B on 1090MHz is not the way to go for this for many reasons. I also applaud the use of ISM bands for this because as RC model control systems have shown, you CAN build robust links on ISM bands if you are frequency agile and design your link for resilience - and you completely sidestep the problem of having to wait a decade or three for ITU... The only thing I am somewhat disappointed by is that SRD860 specifies the use of 2-GFSK. A technically superior modulation would have been CSS (Chirp Spread Spectrum) along with channel hopping. It feels a bit like GFSK was chosen because that is what the contributors to that spec had experience with (Flarm et al) and perhaps also having an eye on adding ADS-L capabilities to existing devices via a firmware update. While this can make sense on paper, in practice the majority of the future ADS-L users don't have FLARM equipped today. Also, not sure what the point of ADS-L4Mobile is. We already have plenty of specs that cover such a capability (see Traffic/Telemetry service in CORUS XUAM Conops Ed 4). I would hope that such a specification at least takes what's already there and improves upon it, and not reinvent the wheel. Very interesting question from DFS about who's going to build the tracker. For sure I hope USSPs don't, because very few companies have the know-how to implement such a thing properly. And you can't just pipe drone telemetry into an ATM tracker without additional development because their traffic movement profiles encompass only what's known and expected in traditional manned aviation. Oh and lastly: I am not sure the current specifications can survive in the real world as they are today. For one, without MLAT you immediately have the problem of being unable to filter out fake transmissions and thus it is easy for anyone with a HackRF to effectively jam the airspace in a wide area. I believe use of the currently-optional signature field in the payload will have to become mandatory.