While I can't recall many other (any?) posts on the Forum from Australia, I thought I would start a new thread because the announcement of the end of Beta and the advent of the shop will likely generate interest Downunder. It should also help to coalesce my own thinking.
Would PAW be of value in Australia? I think the answer there is a definite "yes". Even though our airspace is relatively unpopulated over much of the country, that is not the case around major population centres and there have been a number of mid-air incidents over the years. Moreover, our ultralights are permitted to fly between 5000 feet and 10,000 feet outside controlled airspace,where there is operational need to do so. So we have all the elements at play in our skies that are common elsewhere, so potentially the availability of PAW would offer the same advantages as it does for our cousins in Europe or elsewhere.
That said, there are several major obstacles to its use in Australia. The first is the choice of licence-free frequency on which to operate the transceiver sending and receiving data on non-ADSP equipped aircraft. This feature is critical to the success of PAW, in my view, and is what separates it from other offerings also using the DTV dongle, WiFi and Rasperry Pi platform. 868 Hz is a licence free allocation in the UK and Europe but not I understand in North America? and certainly not in Australia. Here it is assigned to the mobile or cellphone industry and is in active use by the major players in that market, servicing the majority of the country. Those players have also paid very substantial licence fees for its use. There is therefore zero hope of persuading that regulatory authority, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to release that frequency for unlicenced scientific, industrial or medical use, such that would allow us to operate on 868 MHz.
What if we were to ignore the pre-existing allocated users and switch on our PAWs, surely we would still be able to have its benefits? Well, no. Apart from the fact that the transmissions from your PAW would be illegal (receiving is lawful), and any detected interference from your PAW would bring heavy and swift regulatory intervention, the grim truth of the physics involved is that your transmissions and reception would most likely be swamped by the much more powerful transmitters on the nearby mobile or cell phone towers. If out and out power swamping, over-riding the receiver's front end, wasn't enough, there is also the effect of FM capture to consider. While I do not know which particular RF device has been selected for the production PAW, I think I can safely assume that it is some form of FM transmitter, most likely AFSK or multiple frequency shift keying. The key feature of FM transmission is that the intelligence is modulated onto the carrier wave by varying the frequency, rather than by varying the amplitude, as with an AM or SSB transmitter. Hence a "big" FM signal will vary the frequency by an amount that simply gobbles up a weaker signal's frequency variations, so that it effectively vanishes as far as the receiving station is concerned.
What frequencies might be available for PAW's use in Australia? Well, we certainly have licence-free ISM allocations available in Australia, as an examination of the ACMA material will reveal, just not where they are in the UK and Europe. Now I am not a glider pilot, well not until unless conducting forced landing practice and even then, the fan up the front is still turning over at idle, but I thought a trip to the Gliding Federation of Australia might be instructive. It was! To no great surprise I found that Flarm is already in use among the Australian gliding fraternity but the GFA website leads to warnings to visiting international gliding pilots that they need to change the frequency on which their Flarm units operate to use the Australian GFA standard of 921MHz. Cross-checking with the ACMA references, I can confirm that the GFA is using a genuine licence-free ISM allocation. Now that is encouraging. If we can find suitable transceiver modules that operate in that part of the spectrum, we should be able to clear the legal hurdle, leaving only any necessary changes to the PAW software. Here I am assuming that we would only be looking to the experimental and /or ultralight aircraft operator, not going down a certification route. I think doing otherwise would promptly price PAW out of the market.
Then comes the question of how to promote widespread adoption of PAW, assuming we can re-equip with conforming RF devices. It wouldn't be of full potential value unless there are big mobs of aircraft using it, to complement the ADSB signals from the bigger blokes.
Just as in Europe and the UK, we would need to persuade the major Nav/EFB software makers to "adopt" PAW. EasyVFR has already got a sizable Australian following, so the toehold is there, although I think it must be acknowledged that the Australian market is really dominated by two other players, OzRunways and Avplan. Both now offer their product for the iOS and Android markets, although from my perspective both have been slow to develop their Android products beyond the rudimentary market offerings that first appeared some 18 months ago.
Would they be interested? I can't speak for Avplan, or OzRunways for that matter. I am a subscriber to AvplanLite for Android but so far have not used it in anger, as it looks to be too light for my comfort. Likewise I am a subscriber to both EasyVFR and OzRunways, being still in the process of comparative evaluation before deciding on my preferred tool. EasyVFR already supports PAW, as indicated earlier. OzRunways supports a DTV, WiFi and Raspberry Pi tool already, selling kits to help pilots get the system operational. Like a non-RF shield PAW though, it is limited to receiving and displaying ADSB traffic. That suggests to me that the changes necessary to allow OzRunways to implement PAW would neither be too foreign for the company to contemplate nor too difficult to incorporate. I dare say though, they might require some inducement to do so, maybe the opportunity to sell PAW Classic in Australia? Of course, were PAW Classic to become widespread enough in Australia, customer demand would mean that no EFB/nav software vendor could afford not to have it included among their product's features.
So, there you have it. My thoughts as at this date.
It follows that my advice to fellow Australians contemplating using PAW is to hold off, if detecting and displaying non-ADSB traffic is your objective. If you will be happy with just ADSB traffic, this tool will do it provided you are using a compatible navigation tool such as EasyVFR. If you are currently using OzRunways, at this time you should probably look at its native product if you are happy to display just ADSB traffic. Note though that you will need to be using OzRunways on an iOS device. You won't find the ADSB display function on the Android version, along with a significant number of other missing features that have now long been enjoyed by the iOS user. If you would like to use their tool to display ADSB traffic on your Android licenced version, I suggest you add your voice to pressure OzRunways to lift its game and bring Android functionality into line with its iOS offering. They really have been dragging their feet in this area.
Since writing all that appears above, I have been following up the leads offered in earlier threads about similar developments in the USA and in particular, Flightbox from Open Flight Solutions, which implements the Stratux project concept. The website for Flightbox indicates that its users have tested it independently from the EFB vendors and have found that it works on both Avplan using Android and OzRunways using both Android and iOS. If that is the case it would be even more promising but I'm afraid that just is not the case.
As stated earlier, OzRunways for Android does not implement the means to exhibit ADSB traffic using OzRunways' own hardware and certainly has no means of selecting a WiFi link that I can find. I think it is fairly obvious that the Flightbox user testers were actually using the iOS version. As for Avplan Lite, I can find a user setting to open a dedicated X-Plane interface that is hard coded but nothing else that would suggest I could connect to the Flightbox WiFi. Again, it looks as though the testers were using the iOS version, even though Flightbox doesn't include the iOS product among the known EFBs compatible with its offering. For its part, Avplan's web shop clearly states that ADSB in is only available on the iOS version of Avplan Lite, as it is on the more fully featured versions of Avplan, all of which only run on iOS. About the only joy I can take from that little exploration is that Avplan should also not find the concept of displaying PAW derived data too foreign, if we can get to that point, as it is already well down that road with Flightbox on its iOS platforms.
Bill
