FLARM in the USA question

[[email protected]]

I would like to know how (and when) FLARM got approved for operation in the USA (FCC? different frequency?). The manual still says; "Operation of FLARM is forbidden in the USA or Canada or in aircraft registered in the USA or Canada."

Thanks,
Kolie Lombard

[Dan Daly[_2_]]

On Friday, May 4, 2018 at 8:35:00 AM UTC-4, wrote:
> I would like to know how (and when) FLARM got approved for operation in the USA (FCC? different frequency?). The manual still says; "Operation of FLARM is forbidden in the USA or Canada or in aircraft registered in the USA or Canada."
>
> Thanks,
> Kolie Lombard

In Canada, the only FLARMs legal to use are the PowerFLARM CORE and Portable sold by FLARM Technology. Devices which are on the Industry Canada (FCC equivalent) Radio Equipment List are authorized. The frequency spectrum is common between Canada and the U.S., 902-928 MHz; radiated power for the Portable is 0.01w, the CORE, 0.018w.
Canadian Approval doc for Portable: https://industrycanada.co/10154A-FLAPFP24 dated 9 Mar 2012.
Canadian Approval doc for CORE/Brick: https://industrycanada.co/10154A-FLAPFC10 dated 14 Aug 2012.
I googled for you ("PowerFLARM FCC approval document") and it coughed up:
https://fccid.io/ZKUGC625162 which gives the CORE approval in July 2012, with the testing etc. From that, I got the link for the company, then the link for the Portable: https://fccid.io/ZKUGC625161 7 January 2011. It does not seem that long ago...

You can see the testing required for approval in the FCC documents; this is expensive (which is why I expect no one else's FLARMs are approved yet). I have read that LX Navigation and LX Nav have submitted their FLARMs for testing, but no approvals yet. You could ask the dealers.

The frequency change from Europe was done since the spectrum used - Industrial, Scientific, Medical (ISM) is different, and 868MHz is allocated for celluar phones in Canada (I assume US too) vs ISM in Europe.

Which FLARM are you talking about?

[[email protected]]

Dan, thanks or your detailed response. My question was prompted by the following announcement:

https://www.suasnews.com/2018/05/open-flarm-uas-eid-standard-published/

This link was forwarded to me with the warning from the manual that says; "Operation of FLARM is forbidden in the USA or Canada or in aircraft registered in the USA or Canada."

My argument was that the manual refers to a different (manually operated) system, and that some versions of FLARM are used by at least glider pilots in the USA already.

The bottom line is that I am curious if the "open FLARM UAS eID standard" mentioned in the article will find any traction in the USA and what it would take for that to happen.

Kolie

[[email protected]]

I have PowerFlarm Core Manual Version 150, January 19, 2016.
Page 31, paragraph 4,"Within the USA, the device may only be used in transportation vehicles such as aircraft or motor vehicles."

I have read this manual pretty carefully after this post of "Operation of
FLARM is forbidden in the USA..."

I am asking Kolie Lombard to clarify where he got his information.

[kinsell]

On 05/04/2018 06:11 PM, wrote:
> I have PowerFlarm Core Manual Version 150, January 19, 2016.
> Page 31, paragraph 4,"Within the USA, the device may only be used in transportation vehicles such as aircraft or motor vehicles."
>
> I have read this manual pretty carefully after this post of "Operation of
> FLARM is forbidden in the USA..."
>
> I am asking Kolie Lombard to clarify where he got his information.
>

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.

[[email protected]]

Thank you.
THis amalgam of "FLARM" units makes the endless discussions all the more difficult.

[Tom BravoMike]

(...)
>
> 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).

[Darryl Ramm]

PowerFLARM is not “quite different” from FLARM, they operate very similarly. This is how misinformation starts—importantly PowerFLARM units fully interoperate with legacy FLARM units using different geographically appropriate frequency bands. They run very similar internal code, etc.

Internally PowerFLARM is more modern than legacy units, but older FLARM products were even capable of operating on ISM frequencies. Not as optimized for that as USA PowerFLARM units are, and legacy units were never FCC approved and so never legal to sell in the USA. USA FCC approval can be a real hurdle for RF products manufacturers. And not something anybody should be operating here. FLARM may well have geo blocked the ISM bands in them by now, I don’t know and don’t care. FLARM to their credit spent lots of effort to design PowerFLARM to pass FCC approval and spent money to get that approval so we could utilize FLARM technology in the USA. That initial delay in getting PowerFLARM released in the USA was Flarm jumping through burning hoops to get that FCC approval.

[[email protected]]

So.....
Classic Flarm units are not permitted in the USA?
Therefore, all of our discussions in the USA should be limited to PowerFlarm?

[Darryl Ramm]

On Friday, May 4, 2018 at 7:05:05 PM UTC-7, wrote:
> So.....
> Classic Flarm units are not permitted in the USA?
> Therefore, all of our discussions in the USA should be limited to PowerFlarm?

Where have you you been Guy? :-) All our discussion in the USA *has* been about PowerFLARM.

A large part of the focus on getting PowerFLARM into the USA was because the legacy FLARM was not FCC approved. That the product could also offer some ADS-B compatibility was another reason to want to go that way (with the USA ahead of the rest of the world on ADS-B adoption).

Now as pointed out here it seems like other vendors are working to get FCC approval for their FLARM products in the USA, so it will get a little more confusing how we talk about different FLARM products. But nobody is going to go back in time and invest $$$ and effort to get old legacy FLARM products FCC approved for use in the USA.

[[email protected]]

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!

[Darryl Ramm]

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.

[Darryl Ramm]

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.