Low cost ADS-B Options

On Monday, August 1, 2016 at 2:02:27 PM UTC-7, vontresc wrote:
[snip]

I was talking to the guys a uAvionix at Oshkosh this weekend, and they have a truly interesting ADS-
B solution that may actually work well for us glider folks.

http://www.uavionix.com/products/ping200b0/

They had the prototype they were testing at the show, and it truly was a tiny device. Hopebully they will follow through with the box, and get it blessed by the feds. Tiny physical size, 500mA power draw, and weighs 50 grams. Let's hope the pricetag doesn't break the bank.

Peter

That is intersting, and it's great to see broad innovation happening in things related to ADS-B.

But it is worrying that the specs they present makes this not look like a Mode-S transponder. They mention no Mode-S or any other transponder related spec/standard. It might even have no 1030MHz receiver hardware at all. Once concern there in the UAV market would be the lack of compatibility with TCAS. You don't want airliners flying into UAVs, including UAVs that are out of control and have no way of avoiding the airliner. If the device is really intended to be a transponder then they have awful marketing.

The company is small and just received $5M in investment. Nothing they make meets TSO approval, but OK they are just getting started, hopefully they have folks with a background designing and manufacturing TSO approved avionics--but the company has been solidly targets the low-end UAV space. I question why they would want to worry about manned aircraft. The marketing and other costs alone just related with that for a new vendor are going to be significant. Maybe worth watching, but they need to improve their marketing/clean up/better state their claims if they think they are going after the manned aircraft market (and they certainly claim they are). They started out with a focus on receivers, which is great, but it's a very different thing to do say a TSO-ed ADS-B transmitter for general aviation.

Unfortunately reading stuff from them smells a bit too much like hype. When they talk about the PingNAV GPS source is "ADS-B Out compliant" but the needed specs are really not there, even as a promise of future compatibility. If they mean it's going to be TSO-C145c compliant or "meet the performance requirements of" then frigging say so, they have an strange way of not stating that clearly--which might be partially inexperience in the avionics market. They do clearly call out "meets requirements of" the GPS-source part of TSO-C199 (i.e. TABS). And I'm not sure it makes sense for a drone/UAV manufacturer to seek TSO approval on such a device. And TSO-C199 approval or even "meets requirements of" is not enough for ADS-B Out equipage today (certainly not in certified aircraft). Now if gliders lost their transponder/ADS-B out exemptions I'd actually like to see TABS carriage available as a means of compliance for ADS-B Out for gliders.. or available for voluntary equipage/non-mandated carriage.

BTW another interesting company in the UAV space is Sagetech (http://sagetechcorp.com/index.html). They've been shipping pretty impressive miniature transponders and ADS-B out systems for UAVs for a while. and have a less hyped feel than Uavionix.

Anyhow I guess it is good to see stuff happening. Not that I necessarily am too excited about lots of UAVs sharing airspace with manned aircraft.... but we get to sit back and see who delivers stuff here.