Status PowerFLARM for USA

We are well aware that we have stressed the patience of our fellow
pilots with repeated delays and would like to apologize for this.
Here's the status as of Monday 16-May-2011.

First, the good news. The portable PowerFLARM is shipping to GA pilots
in Europe, with close to 500 already delivered, and initial customer
feedback has been very positive. It is real and shipping. Initially
some secondary features are missing but will be available via software
updates (PCAS Mode A/C display, flight recording, ADS-B target
alarming and dataport output, obstacle warning, check lists).

Now for the bad news. We had difficulty with FCC testing, caused by a
third party module (not by the FLARM radio...). We believe we have now
found a solution which will result in successful FCC certification of
the portable PowerFLARM, and will allow us to deliver portable units
to USA by end of June.

Now for some worse news: The non-portable “brick” unit was delayed
pending successful testing of the base design. We will now accelerate
design, production and testing of this model, but realistically it
will not be ready for the USA 2011 season (it will take until fall to
finish design, production, and FCC testing).

And finally, some excuses: When we specified PowerFLARM we did not
anticipate that merging the technologies of FLARM, PCAS, ADS-B, LCD
display, internal GPS antenna and batteries would be so challenging.
Our desire to design it all into the smallest and lightest possible
package did not make things simpler either. Also, huge amount of
effort went into making classic FLARM and PowerFLARM fully compatible;
even though they run on very different processors they now share over
90% of the core RF and collision-detection code. This was possible due
to the ‘mandatory update’ to firmware version 5 which all ‘classic’
FLARM had to perform after March 2011.

We will post videos of PowerFLARM in operation shortly and keep you
updated on progress at least every other week.

The FLARM team, 16-May-2011