On Wed, 20 May 2015 06:04:00 -0700, mark.lenox wrote:

It's been admittedly a lousy spring for soaring in Houston this year so
we have had much time to do maintenance and upgrades on the fleet (if
this weather keeps up, snorkels will be next). I have been installing
FLARM in our club aircraft this winter, purely for the anti-collision
features. It seems to me that making that position information
available to our field officer of the day would be quite useful, and
this has led me to OGN.

A few items...

1) There don't seem to be any OGN receivers operating in the USA. Is
there a reason for this?

2) most of our serious cross country pilots use SPOT, and we often have
the glideport.aero website up on the big screen in the clubhouse so
people on the ground can see what is going on. Would love to be able
to combine our locally created radio derived tracking information with
the satellite derived data and get a single view. Anybody from
glideport.aero want comment on this, would love to work with you on
that. Maybe there is a way to do it already.

3) The DIY OGN tracking transmitters are a great fit for us for this
application. We are only slowly building out FLARM in the fleet as it
costs a couple thousand dollars per ship to outfit. I could add
tracking so we could at least see the whole fleet for $50 per ship. We
have 7 aircraft in the fleet, so money is pretty significant.

4) radio range won't be a big problem for us as its flat here and we
have friends at airports all over the area. We can get good coverage of
a wide area, but would still like to hear what people get for range so I
can plan. Really... No hype.

Thoughts?


Mark

The future of OGN using Flarm data is cloudy, at best:

https://www.change.org/p/mr-urs-roth...ition-against-
flarm-decision-to-encrypt-the-communication-protocol

Why OGN hasn't caught on in the US may have something to do with the
different spectrum used by the Flarms, not sure. Plus the shakey start
for Flarms here.

People I tend to fly with are happy with SPOT and similar. They provide
better SAR capabilities, with the side benefit of entertaining the ground
crew adequately. Cost is more but they work better.

-Dave