Talking to the folks at the leading ADS-B manufacturers it’s easy to forget that just a year ago the prospects for making any money selling gear for the FAA’s next-gen surveillance scheme sounded far-fetched, because this year everybody who had ADS-B gear to sell was making money hand over fist. This was true for Sporty’s and Appareo who along with partner ForeFlight were early to market with the Stratus box, an $800 portable unit that gets ADS-B weather and displays it smartly on your ForeFlight app on your iPad . . . all wirelessly. It was also true for FreeFlight, which had a remote-mount ADS-B box that does In and Out and will soon link popular displays, says FreeFlight, all for around $6,000. Garmin was at Oshkosh this year with boxes of each variety, and flavors of all of the above, including a portable ADS-B unit that does weather and traffic. There were ADS-B solutions from Dual, from Sagetech, from SkyRadar and others, and customers were lining up to check them out and put their money down.
This should make the FAA happy, but it hasn’t. People are equipping with ADS-B because of the benefits (traffic and weather), just as the feds hoped they would, but they’re not doing it the right way, that is, by getting a panel-mount ADS-B with “out” capability.
Unless you have the “out” ability, which you only get with a certificated panel-mounted unit, you aren’t, to borrow the FAA’s term for it, participating. You’re coming to the potluck but you failed to bring a casserole. When 2020 rolls around, you’d better have that dish hot and ready if you want to fly places where there are houses and roads around. But for now, you can freeload. It’s what I’m doing.
The reason people can get by with ADS-B “In” only is because of the rise of portable units, which are a legal cheat, the existence of which the feds apparently never envisioned, unlike every aviation geek in the world who immediately thought of the idea of a portable receiver as soon as the FAA announced the weather benefit.
The issues with portables are twofold. First, they can never be ADS-B Out boxes because to do that, according to a RF guy I trust, they’d need to transmit at high power, so unless you want to cook lunch on the glareshield while you’re sending your signal, a portable ADS-B Out unit isn’t a great idea. It’s also questionably legal.
I say questionably, because the regulations, which require such equipment to meet the regs (not to be certified, mind you, but to meet them) are pretty fuzzy on the subject. That’s why you can have experimental transponders: because they have to meet the TSO but they don’t have to be TSO authorized. It’s the same with ADS-B.
The thing that the FAA didn’t see coming was that pilots were going to be more excited about the weather than the traffic. The Stratus box doesn’t even provide traffic, in part because the developers thought that ADS-B In only traffic wasn’t ready for prime time.
ADS-B traffic is really a “some traffic” awareness utility that leaves you completely blind to other traffic. If you are “in” only, then you only see ADS-B traffic in your line of sight, and other traffic that your ADS-B target is “lighting up” in proximity to a ground station.
The practical effect is that you see clumps of traffic around ground stations when an ADS-B target is nearby, which is great, but you’ll miss most of the rest of the targets pretty much the entire rest of the time.
Which leads to the question: Is it better to have some traffic than none at all? I think so, but reasonable pilots and reasonable manufacturers disagree on this one.
But it’s not that simple. (As though any of this is “simple.”) The FAA makes it even worse by purposely choosing to not send a lot of the traffic info to non-participating airplanes that airplanes with panel-mount gear do get. “If you don’t bring a record,” they seem to be saying, “we won’t let you dance at our party.” It’s their way of encouraging people to equip with ADS-B Out.
Which is all well and good until somebody with ADS-In hits somebody else they might otherwise have seen and the FAA has to explain why it took such a foolhardy risk with our safety.
The end result for the FAA is that there are going to be thousands of pilots (already are, in fact) flying around with ADS-B In waiting until 2020 or near then to equip. So the level of participation will be lower for longer as a result of the FAA’s ham-handed amateur motivational schemes, when if they had just left well enough alone, there’d be many more owners dropping certified gear into their panels and, hence, fully participating in this ADS-B scheme, which by its nature, requires a community commitment.
So much for the FAA’s social engineering plans.
All Comments
OK, so now to make myself unpopular with some people. Just as the FAA did with 121.5 ELTs, they should cancel the TSO for non-ADSB transponders. That is, all new transponders would need to be ADSB Out. Over the next 8 years a lot of transponders will be bought and installed which will increase the coverage and the rebroadcast by the ground stations. IMHO all UAVs must be fitted with ADSB Out immediately. At least I'll be able to see them on my iPad even if they are too small to see out the window.
Great comment on encoders! The cheaper ADSB-Out is the faster it will be implemented and the safer the skies will become... of course that depends on the separation of aircraft, which will lessen as ADSB becomes a reality.
That means reaction time and see and avoid will become even more critical.
Unfortunate decision, dubious logic. I've been flying with TIS for years (Garmin 330 to 396) and it's amazing how much traffic I don't see and that controllers don't call out even if I'm participating (IFR or VFR flight following). It's an all-too-common occurrence - the point out never comes or comes too late. It's nice to see for myself where the other planes are. To intentionally obscure this information is borderline criminal...left for a jury to decide somewhere, I guess.
I heard contradictory things at Oshkosh. Some vendors told me that if I had ADS-B In and anyone in the area transmitted ADS-B Out, then when the ground station replied to that transmission, my receiver would momentarily get all the traffic. Specifically, that the transmission is not encoded so as to be received by only one aircraft (the one transmitting ADS-B Out). This would make sense: using the air, you want to use broadcast technologies, not pointcast ones (too much bandwidth). If no-one broadcasts Out, I would get no traffic at all. And, if I were far from a ground station I would see only those aircraft with ADS-B Out (who would not see me). (Also, I would need a dual-band receiver even to see all the ADS-B Out.)
You mention that "The FAA makes it even worse by purposely choosing to not send a lot of the traffic info to non-participating airplanes that airplanes with panel-mount gear do get" - can you clarify? Because that calls into question what the vendors told me.
Thomas--from a friend in the industry:
". . . the FAA cannot prevent folks from receiving air-to-air traffic. [dual-band] products like the GDL 39 can receive this data if a nearby aircraft is already ADS-B out equipped (1090 MHz or 978 MHz). The UAT 978 Mhz ground stations help fill in the ADS-B gap providing “participating”, aircraft specific payload of traffic 15 miles around them and +/- 3500 feet of their altitude. This provides the participating aircraft radar tracked targets, like Mode C targets as well as the cross over if you are compliant with UAT 978 and cannot receive 1090 Mhz. If you’re not out, you can only mooch of those that are participating or receive those who are already ADS-B out compliant.
Robert - thanks. It sounds like what I was told at Oshkosh is correct: you can free ride in high-density areas (the LA basin, for example) in reasonable security, given the large amount of jet traffic around. But out in the boonies, it will do nothing for you. The thing about all this moral outrage toward moochers (on the FAA's part) is that many of us are renters! We can't have portable ADS-B Out, but we do what we can to avoid a midair - which is to mooch.
Robert - a further follow up. On the potential for portable ADS-B Out, can you run something by that RF guy you trust? According to a document I found, UAT can transmit as little as 7W (up to 18W) with a 0.03% duty cycle. Compared to a handheld comm radio (rated as 5W continuous), that's nothing. I think the bigger problem is likely to be that the ADS-B signal is required to encode a serial number unique to the airplane rather than to the radio, which is a bigger issue. It's also required to transmit the same squawk as any separate XPDR, which means a portable unit would have to receive Mode C to get the airplane's own code - but that's quite feasible, as Zaon has established. So, the FAA/ICAO would have to change the rules to allow the unique ID to be associated with the radio (in the case of a portable), but it doesn't seem to me like there's any technical issue that would truly prohibit a portable ADS-B Out.
The unique ID that @Robert mentions is definitely the problem, and also a point of interest for the government i'm sure.
Not to be too tin-foil hat about this, well ok i will be: how else can Big Brother keep track of you and all your transgressions at all times ?
Am I the only one who's concerned that the entire house of ADS-B cards is dependent upon the OUT aircraft knowing where it is? If your coupled nav system goes down, your position report is... null. At least radar can see a primary target. When (not if) the GPS network goes down, the least of your worries may be that you become unsure of your own position. ATC won't have any idea of where ANYONE is in the sky - because all of the vehicles will become invisible to them.
Yeah, I know - I'm a (old) fart in the airlock.
Interestingly, SkyVision is now promoting... portable ADSB Out (and In).
Yars, I agree with you. There have been moves to incorporate the GLONASS system as a backup to GPS. It would be nice to see some entrepreneurs get moving on using MEMS sensors to offer low-cost (and admittedly rather approximate) inertial nav systems as a secondary backup.
Because, right now, if GPS goes down, you're back to some real (old) fart technology: last known position and time, compass, stopwatch, ASI, altimeter, weather forecast, chart, and Mk I Eyeball.
