Topics

1

General Discussion / External GPS

« on: September 26, 2019, 09:36:41 am »

I'm looking at how to put a PilotAware in a certified aircraft.

To stay legal, at the moment I think it needs to be a 'temporary' installation.  Because there's not much room up front, I'm thinking of putting it down the back, and having external PAW and ADSB blade antennas. [Then by unplugging it, it can come out - hence temporary].

My problem is the GPS.  Can anyone help on how I can get a good GPS signal to the PilotAware?

- I could run a cable and mount the USB GPS on the coaming, but it's not very neat.
- I could put the USB GPS on the side of the back window - but again not very neat, and not a great view of the sky
- really I need a GPS to feed the PilotAware that can use an external antenna, or has an external mounting.
- or a GPS that I could put on the coaming that doesn't need a wire.

Anyone have any solutions?

Paul

2

General Discussion / Drone jamming trials

« on: September 11, 2018, 05:28:13 pm »

Hi All

Just to let you know that there are plans for some military drone jamming trials in the UK Stanford Training Area (next to Lakenheath) this month.

They'll be jamming both GPS frequencies and 868 MHz - for up to 2 minutes at a time.  It will be NOTAM'd

I'd have thought that might be quite effective in interfering with GPS, Flarm, PAW and OGN-R.

Paul

3

OGN-R PilotAware / OGN-R antenna solutions

« on: January 26, 2018, 10:18:26 am »

I've been doing some work on a couple of antenna solutions for OGN-R stations.

One (from Keith) is a 5 dBi antenna similar to but shorter than the 9 dBi Chinese antenna.  This is much easier to use than building pieces of plastic pipe.  The second is a single antenna solution using an RF splitter and a single 9 dBi Chinese antenna.  Theoretically, best results should come from the two antenna solution.  The single antenna solution should have a ~30% reduced range for the OGN receiver, but normal range for the PAW one.  However, given that we have good OGN coverage in a lot of areas, this is probably a good tradeoff given the extra functionality.  Cost is pretty much the same.

Given the relatively high output power of the PAW radio (+27 dBm) it's a concern as to whether the input to the SDR radio will be damaged if too much power is coupled.  So I've just done some measurements on the Orwell setup where there is a 9dBi antenna about 50cm away from a 9dBi antenna, and another 9 dBi antenna about 7m away.

The two close antennas have about a -20 dB gain between them.  That implies about 5mW peak power coupled into the OGN radio, which at a duty cycle of not more than 10% will hopefully be OK.  Interestingly, the splitter also gives a 20dB isolation between the radios, so the result is about the same.

The distant antennas have in excess of -40 dB gain between them, so if you can, keeping the two antennas a decent distance apart could be useful.

I'll shortly be running two OGN-R stations at Orwell - one single antenna and one dual antenna.  It should be interesting to compare the results.

Paul

4

Technical Support / Interfacing PAW with LX90X0 nav computers and Flarmview units

« on: December 09, 2017, 08:25:18 am »

Hi All

I'm planning to try and integrate a PAW with the LX9070 nav computer and Flarmview 57 in my glider.

Before I reinvent the wheel, has anyone done this before?

Thanks

Paul

5

OGN-R PilotAware / PAW signal strength

« on: December 08, 2017, 04:21:03 pm »

Hi All

I have a new station (Orwell2), which is detecting both OGN and PAW traffic.  Yay!

So far, the PAW traffic is just a PAW unit 50m away.

Am I able to see any metric which tells me the strength of signals picked up from PAW?  I know how to get to the equivalent Flarm ones (telnet localhost 50001), but the equivalent output for the PAW unit (50002) doesn't seem to give any signal strength metrics.

Thanks

Paul

6

OGN-R PilotAware / Update of station / remote login

« on: December 08, 2017, 04:18:00 pm »

Hi All

Three questions:

1. Can anyone point me to an explanation of how the read only software is implemented for an OGN-R station?  Specifically, I have a remote login approach which I use for OGN stations (reverse SSH tunneling) which I want to implement on OGN-R stations that I will be managing.  How might I go about this?

2. When a new version of the OGN-R software is released, does the upgrade happen automatically, or is it manual?

3. In the event of an upgrade, will the additions in (1) survive?

Thanks

Paul