* 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.
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.
* 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.