* People don't enable DFS and they mess up radar for Airports.
* ~20 reported incidents, people are fined ~$25k and stop.
* Therefore we must make it illegal to change the firmware on wireless devices.
Only 20 cases? $25k fines!? Why can't we continue to solve this problem like this? The hobbyists flashing their devices with OpenWRT and then making a conscious decision to override defaults (upon which OpenWRT will warn you about legality) are a rare breed. Those that foolishly do this are being fined heavily.
Because one case can (potentially) cause the radar to miss a wind-shear threat, which is precisely what the radar is there to detect. Missing that can cause a plane crash and kill anywhere from one to a few hundred people.
Given that level of potential downside (even if things would have to happen exactly wrong for it to occur), I'm not sure that "we fine them $25K and they stop" is the right trade-off. I'm not sure that "only 20 reported incidents" is a level that you should expect people to be comfortable with. I'm not sure "we'll continue to not be horribly unlucky" is a valid approach.
You would stop all WiFi experimentation just to decrease slightly the odds of inference with a radar that _might_ help prevent a crash? We don't live in a society focused entirely on safety. Safety is important, but it's not trump card that automatically beats all other concerns. When a proposed policy reduces risks only slightly but has large costs, we shouldn't enact that policy.
Now, who decides what "slightly" and "large" mean in this context? You didn't provide any numbers. Given that 87,000 [1] flights take off and land safely in the US each day and that there have been 20 reported TDWR inference incidents ever, we cannot justify the harm this policy would do to the technology community.
This is just a variation on the old "Turn off your Game Boys before takeoff, or the plane might crash" schtick.
The proper way to fix that issue, if there ever was one, was to mandate the implementation of avionics that can't be jammed by a Part 15 device. Instead, look what happened... we got a decade of silly, groundless rules that had no useful effect and were eventually scrapped.
Now it looks like it's the WiFi industry's turn. Gee, maybe putting weather radar right next to an unlicensed ISM band wasn't such a great idea. Maybe they're the ones who should move.
Gee, maybe putting weather radar right next to an unlicensed ISM band wasn't such a great idea. Maybe they're the ones who should move.
Doesn't work that way. They're trying to detect air movement. That's hard; it's not possible at just random frequencies. You can't (effectively) move the radars without changing physics. They're at the frequency they're at for a reason, not just because of random bureaucratic decisions.
(Of course, it's not that simple. Of course you can move them - at some loss of effectiveness. How much, to move them how far? I can't answer that.)
I haven't looked into it in depth, but AFAIK weather radar works at X band, doesn't it? And it doesn't detect air movement, but water droplets, correct?
It's not quite the same as the gameboy. There have never been any instances of electronics interfering with avionics, but there have been quite a few instances of wifi interfering with weather radar. Also the weather radar was there first, and the issues were known right from the start.
20 that have been noticed and charged. One is too many. How would you like to end up flying through a thunderstorm or a microburst? Most of the cases happened in Puerto Rico, where they get thunderstorms almost every day at certain times of year. It just takes one plane to fly through a thunderstorm to give everyone a very bad day.
Kill all humans. That's a surefire way to prevent any more violations. After all, "one is too many". Your comments indicate that you're not even trying to balance different public interest concerns.
I'm a pilot, so I understand the issue first-hand. The simple way to balance all interests is to separate the radio software from the router software. Are you more interested in getting a cheap flashable router than in air safety? This has nothing to do with freedom, but more to do with people/companies being too cheap to separate the radio from the router software.
Not the best way to balance all interests - then you get into a wonderful situation like we have in the mobile market where there's a closed source, proprietary, unauditable (and therefore potentially hostile) blob running in the radio that can do evil things no matter what the rest of the software is doing.
Personally I like the way that we handle people who point lasers at aircraft: find them, throw the book at them pour encourager les autres, and meanwhile don't try to ban f*cking laser pointers.
Are you more interested in getting a cheap flashable router than in air safety?
Yes, it's more important that 299m Americans who don't live beside an airport be able to use that spectrum than some small number of passengers per year that may or may not die in a possible crash that might be caused by wifi interference.
There are so many lower-hanging fruit for safety that this is a non-issue.
>Are you more interested in getting a cheap flashable router than in air safety?
Yes, I do not fly, have no interest in flying and could care less if the entire aviation industry went bankrupt. I stopped flying the day the TSA took over the airports.
False dichotomy. The pilots like yourself are more of a risk to everyone on the plane than the probability of one of these causing a crash. Was it a WiFi router than made a Malaysian airline fly over an active war zone? Was it a WiFi router that causes the air France pilots to forget how to fly and stall the Airbus into the ocean?
Why not just increase patrols for people breaking the law? Or change the radar to use a different frequency?
Honestly, if I had to decide between the ability to choose free software, and having all flights grounded indefinitely I would go with the software. I know my opinion is not the majority though.
It would have been a lot easier for the FCC to have just not allowed unlicensed use on these channels than move all the weather RADAR. Instead, they put a lot of effort into rules that would make unlicensed use possible alongside it. Please remember this before firing off your letters to the FCC, and think about the alternative if the Commission can't count of reliable DFS.
Comments
First I would advise you to understand why this is being done.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10137739
I don't understand your/his reasoning here.
* People don't enable DFS and they mess up radar for Airports.
* ~20 reported incidents, people are fined ~$25k and stop.
* Therefore we must make it illegal to change the firmware on wireless devices.
Only 20 cases? $25k fines!? Why can't we continue to solve this problem like this? The hobbyists flashing their devices with OpenWRT and then making a conscious decision to override defaults (upon which OpenWRT will warn you about legality) are a rare breed. Those that foolishly do this are being fined heavily.
I just don't understand the jump.
Because one case can (potentially) cause the radar to miss a wind-shear threat, which is precisely what the radar is there to detect. Missing that can cause a plane crash and kill anywhere from one to a few hundred people.
Given that level of potential downside (even if things would have to happen exactly wrong for it to occur), I'm not sure that "we fine them $25K and they stop" is the right trade-off. I'm not sure that "only 20 reported incidents" is a level that you should expect people to be comfortable with. I'm not sure "we'll continue to not be horribly unlucky" is a valid approach.
You would stop all WiFi experimentation just to decrease slightly the odds of inference with a radar that _might_ help prevent a crash? We don't live in a society focused entirely on safety. Safety is important, but it's not trump card that automatically beats all other concerns. When a proposed policy reduces risks only slightly but has large costs, we shouldn't enact that policy.
Now, who decides what "slightly" and "large" mean in this context? You didn't provide any numbers. Given that 87,000 [1] flights take off and land safely in the US each day and that there have been 20 reported TDWR inference incidents ever, we cannot justify the harm this policy would do to the technology community.
[1] http://sos.noaa.gov/Datasets/dataset.php?id=44
This is just a variation on the old "Turn off your Game Boys before takeoff, or the plane might crash" schtick.
The proper way to fix that issue, if there ever was one, was to mandate the implementation of avionics that can't be jammed by a Part 15 device. Instead, look what happened... we got a decade of silly, groundless rules that had no useful effect and were eventually scrapped.
Now it looks like it's the WiFi industry's turn. Gee, maybe putting weather radar right next to an unlicensed ISM band wasn't such a great idea. Maybe they're the ones who should move.
Doesn't work that way. They're trying to detect air movement. That's hard; it's not possible at just random frequencies. You can't (effectively) move the radars without changing physics. They're at the frequency they're at for a reason, not just because of random bureaucratic decisions.
(Of course, it's not that simple. Of course you can move them - at some loss of effectiveness. How much, to move them how far? I can't answer that.)
I haven't looked into it in depth, but AFAIK weather radar works at X band, doesn't it? And it doesn't detect air movement, but water droplets, correct?
It's not quite the same as the gameboy. There have never been any instances of electronics interfering with avionics, but there have been quite a few instances of wifi interfering with weather radar. Also the weather radar was there first, and the issues were known right from the start.
If by "quite a few", you mean "20" - which is insignificant compared to the ~80K flights happening in this country every year.
20 that have been noticed and charged. One is too many. How would you like to end up flying through a thunderstorm or a microburst? Most of the cases happened in Puerto Rico, where they get thunderstorms almost every day at certain times of year. It just takes one plane to fly through a thunderstorm to give everyone a very bad day.
Kill all humans. That's a surefire way to prevent any more violations. After all, "one is too many". Your comments indicate that you're not even trying to balance different public interest concerns.
I'm a pilot, so I understand the issue first-hand. The simple way to balance all interests is to separate the radio software from the router software. Are you more interested in getting a cheap flashable router than in air safety? This has nothing to do with freedom, but more to do with people/companies being too cheap to separate the radio from the router software.
Not the best way to balance all interests - then you get into a wonderful situation like we have in the mobile market where there's a closed source, proprietary, unauditable (and therefore potentially hostile) blob running in the radio that can do evil things no matter what the rest of the software is doing.
Personally I like the way that we handle people who point lasers at aircraft: find them, throw the book at them pour encourager les autres, and meanwhile don't try to ban f*cking laser pointers.
Yes, it's more important that 299m Americans who don't live beside an airport be able to use that spectrum than some small number of passengers per year that may or may not die in a possible crash that might be caused by wifi interference.
There are so many lower-hanging fruit for safety that this is a non-issue.
The 299m Americans who don't live near an airport will be able to continue using that spectrum after this goes into affect.
They will not be able to do that with software of their own choice.
They will as long as it doesn't have a programmable radio.
Yes, I do not fly, have no interest in flying and could care less if the entire aviation industry went bankrupt. I stopped flying the day the TSA took over the airports.
Freedom is more important to me than Flying.
False dichotomy. The pilots like yourself are more of a risk to everyone on the plane than the probability of one of these causing a crash. Was it a WiFi router than made a Malaysian airline fly over an active war zone? Was it a WiFi router that causes the air France pilots to forget how to fly and stall the Airbus into the ocean?
I guess they just don't want to make it too easy to do this, given the serious consequences.
Why not just increase patrols for people breaking the law? Or change the radar to use a different frequency?
Honestly, if I had to decide between the ability to choose free software, and having all flights grounded indefinitely I would go with the software. I know my opinion is not the majority though.
It would have been a lot easier for the FCC to have just not allowed unlicensed use on these channels than move all the weather RADAR. Instead, they put a lot of effort into rules that would make unlicensed use possible alongside it. Please remember this before firing off your letters to the FCC, and think about the alternative if the Commission can't count of reliable DFS.