On 11/20/2020 9:37 AM, waremark wrote:
On Thursday, 19 November 2020 at 22:05:04 UTC, Moshe Braner wrote:
On 11/19/2020 1:21 PM, Eric Greenwell wrote:
Moshe Braner wrote on 11/19/2020 9:31 AM:
On 11/19/2020 11:12 AM, Dan Marotta wrote:
On 11/18/20 4:41 PM, Richard Pfiffner wrote:
According to Flarm the New Fusion transmits and receives on both A
and B Flarm Antennas.
http://www.craggyaero.com/fusion.htm
Richard
www.craggyaero.com
That looks to me like you can buy a license to activate the "B"
antenna. Isn't that like buying a license to active the passenger
side seat belt in a car? Or the rear brakes?
Maybe if you pay extra they'll sell you the feature where it keeps on
working after the firmware "expires"? (As long as the data packets
are still compatible.)
Dan: We have no choice about seat belts and brakes, which are mandated
by law. Do you want to go there with PowerFlarm? :^(
Dan: Buying a license for an optional feature (also known as "buying an
optional feature") is like buying the "primo" optional interior for your
new car, except you can do it anytime, even years after the purchase,
unlike that fancy interior. Would you rather they included everything
that is now optional, and charged you for it, instead letting you pay
for only what you need?
Moshe: They give me the updates FREE anytime I want one. I'm not going
to whine about the 10 minutes it takes me to read the update
instructions and load it into the glider. The present system seems like
a good compromise: all units are no more than 1 year behind in
capability, at no $ cost, and very little time and effort. As pilots, we
are required to "update" our gliders every year with an inspection, to
"update" the pilot every two years with a flight review, to keep our
charts and database current yearly or less, to "update" our parachute
every 180 days - I think we should expect a pilot to also handle
updating Flarm!
I have no problem with the updates, I do them, and certainly recommend
everybody do them. My problem is with it stopping to operate if for
whatever reason somebody didn't do the update yet, even if in fact the
data exchanged still allows interoperability. That is an unnecessary
hit to safety, for everybody around. And it may have contributed to the
recent collision we were discussing. There are better ways to nudge
people to update the firmware.
What makes you think that it does stop operating if somebody did not do the update? I have never seen that said. What I have seen said is that if everybody updates they guarantee there will be full compatibility - quite different.
"The firmware expiration date is not related to the aircraft specific
update cycle/date. The firmware will not expire as long as the firmware
is kept up-to-date according to the AMP. The expiry is always at least
12 months plus a few months of margin in the future when downloaded from
flarm.com."
"If the annual update cycle has expired but the firmware has not yet
expired, the device will in most cases continue to work until firmware
expiry."
"After the expiration date, the system will issue a continuous hard
warning and will not operate."
which seems to be contradicted by:
"If the annual firmware update is not applied, the device may no longer
be interoperable with other FLARM devices without any notification or
warning."
- all quotes from:
https://support.flarm.com/hc/en-us/a...piration-date-
IMO, they can (and probably do) include a software version number in the
data packets, and data packets received that are therefore known to be
in an old and unusable format can be ignored. Since versions overlap in
time, I would guess that data packet format changes that make old
formats unusable rarely happen. If the version of a received packet is
not too old to be used, it should be used, for safety's sake. And
transmission should never be turned off by the software just because it
senses that it's "expired", since it does not know whether future
versions can or cannot use the data it is sending.