Are you ready for Uber flying cars?
I'm still waiting for my personal jetpack.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Some aircraft gear is redundant and can't be switched off.
Thay could except when they are attacking something. They do have to fit into the air traffic control system now,
There will always be The Pony Express, I guess.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Jeff Liebermann
That is a reasonable reality based article.
I think the main problem is still battery life / range / flight duration if you want to go electric. Also I'd like a transport medium that does not drop out of the air like a stone if something with the engines goes wrong. That does require something with auto-rotation capability, or some glide path.
That is why I think gyroplanes are more safe than even quadcopters with tilting wings.
For the Uber thing it is only a matter of time before one drops on somebody. And just a matter of time before one or more fly into each other or into a building.
I'v seen one for sale, from France IIRC, a few years back. Same problem, engine failure and you are toast.
Bike is cheaper and maybe just as fast in the city :-)
Given a reliable, universal, worldwide data net, voice is just data. If people want phones, somebody will sell them.
I still don't understand why people text when they could talk. Or better yet, email.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
We're dumping the old big-box PC with its wireless kb and mouse. We'll just have a two laptops pretty much always on each conference room table, with HDMI to two giant screens. We can partition the conf room when needed. The TVs are just big monitors, on the wall next to big whiteboards.
The current plan is to hand the HDMI cable to visitors who want to use the projector from their laptop. That doesn't happen very often.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
onsdag den 26. september 2018 kl. 19.10.55 UTC+2 skrev snipped-for-privacy@nospam.org:
military aircraft also have transponders and they work with the civilian system unless of course they have good reason to turn them off
Lasse Langwadt
I live very close to a mil airbase and have yet to see one that has the civilian transponder on. That is why I am contemplating building a passive radar system to detect their F35 once it is stationed here (if ever). TheN I WiLl SeLl iT tO tHe RuSsIans
Building an active radar is dangerous, a few years ago they bombed their own tower on a nearby island. They just might mistake me for the enemy...
Not that you need radar, the helies come over so low one day those sucked the tiles from the roof. One jet crashed 2 years ago during an air show here in some water close to that airport. An other one a bit longer ago in the sea close to where I lived.
4 years after I left Amsterdam a 747 cargo plane flew into one of the flats next to where I used to live. We had seen that coming, one evening while in the kitchen I see those 2 headlights coming at me, strange, lived on the 9th floor, nice view over Amsterdam... it pulled up and _just_ passed over me. After discussing that event with a colleague, and realizing you did not have a change to get away, thought it would be a good idea to move, and did. After that I did a project on Schiphol Airport... logic? :-)Anyways passive radar would be part of my drone collision avoidance system....
You are conflating the PHY and MAC (and higher) layers.
In this case the PHY is a problem for your scenario that can't be solved by any amount of fiddling with the higher layers.
5G is an incremental advance, not a revolutionary advance.
Strawberry jam/jelly I believe.
A lot of reliance is placed on the "big sky" theory. There's a lot of validity to that, but there are limitations.
For example, when following a road you should keep it on the left to avoid someone coming in the opposite direction.
And I won't describe what ridge flying is like, other that to say you /expect/ other aircraft to be coming in the other direction at the same height and 140kt closing speed :)
It is normal SOP for many aircraft to fly without ATC. When P1, I've never had any way of contacting anybody outside the cockpit.
Of course I couldn't fly in *controlled* airspace.
Agreed, but voice is definitely a lower priority than data. Given enough money, the customer usually gets what he deserves, errr... demands.
It gives them more time to think. With voice, everything is in real time. If someone is a slow thinker, they make mistakes. Give them a little time to think and consider their position, they make fewer mistakes.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
That depends.
If your property lies within 5 miles of any airport, or is located in any other region of FAA-restricted airspace, then it's definitely someone else's business if you fly it at all.
If you're within 5 miles of an airport, you're required to report your flights in advance to the airport operator and the control tower before you fly, regardless of how high you do or do not intend to fly, and regardless of whether the drone will leave your property boundaries or not.
If your property is in certain areas, the "certain altitude" is zero... you're not allowed to fly it at all.
People used to use smoking to achieve that effect.
A benefit of both SMS and email is that it is asynchronous. You send it when convenient for you, I read it when it is convenient for me. CF phones, where I receive it when it is convenient for you - and usually inconvenient for me.
The same reason they email instead of picking up the phone. The same reason they record TV shows instead of watching them live.
You should have bought a special-purpose conference room screen like the Prowise that we have. It is a "touch screen" (not actually touch, it uses a matrix of light beams across the screen so it acts just before you really touch ut) and it has the PC built in. It has software so you can use it as a whiteboard (and save the drawings) and of course it has several HDMI inputs as well. You can use all software with the touch facility, e.g. to page through a Powerpoint. But it also comes with a laserpen remote with prev/next buttons and of course wireless keyboard and mouse that you can put on the conference table to work on it.
Ours (we have two of them) are on movable pedestals so you can roll them to another room when required, but usually they are in their fixed conference room.
They were bought when we had a computer illiterate general manager who just freaked out having to use a laptop and beamer and with this screen everyone can have successful presentations without needing special directions or having all kinds of problems.
We have a strict company policy forbidding PowerPoint.
What did that cost?
We don't often do "presentations." Mostly the conference room is for brainstorming and design reviews, where it's handy to have a big screen (pcb layouts typically) next to a big whiteboard. We include a title and date on the whiteboard and photograph it, to go into the product design notes folder. A lot of hardware/software/FPGA architectures start on the whiteboard.
That Prowise thing sounds complex. Our screens are just big monitors.
You had a GM that freaked out from having to use a laptop?
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Are you certain of that? Take a look at
The FAA definition of Classes B, C, and D (at least) of controlled airspace, read "from the surface to XXXX feet". So, yes, legally, airspace six inches above the dandelions can be (and in many cases is) part of FAA controlled airspace.
The FAA has legal regulatory authority over all aircraft operations in all airspace within the boundaries of the United States. That authority goes all the way down to the surface... there's no minimum level specified.
This authority derives from an act of Congress, which enacted U.S Code Title 49 Subtitle VII "Aviation Programs".
§ 40103 - Sovereignty and use of airspace reads:(a)Sovereignty and Public Right of Transit.?
(1) The United States Government has exclusive sovereignty of airspace of the United States.
United States Code of Federal Regulation, Title 14, Chapter 1, Subchapter F, Part 107, paragraph 41. "No person may operate a small unmanned aircraft in Class B, Class C, or Class D airspace or within the lateral boundaries of the surface area of Class E airspace designated for an airport unless that person has prior authorization from Air Traffic Control (ATC)."
You can find this, and the other Federal regulations which apply to the use of drones ("small unmanned aircraft systems") via the Government Printing Office site at
A plain-language summary of the regulations can be found at
You can find a listing of the various areas of FAA-controlled airspace at
You will observe that the definitions for many of them do include areas all the way down to the surface. For example, on page D-151, the definition of the Class D airspace around the airport near me reads in part:
"AWP CA D Palo Alto, CA Palo Alto of Santa Clara County Airport, CA (lat. 37°27'40"N., long. 122°06'54"W.)
That airspace extending upward from the surface to but not including 1,500 feet MSL east of the Palo Alto Airport Runway 12/30 extended centerlines within a 3-mile radius of Palo Alto Airport. That airspace extending upward from the surface to and including 2,000 feet MSL west of the Palo Alto Airport Runway 12/30 extended centerline within a 3-mile radius of the Palo Alto Airport."
My home is in that Class D airspace (and another, surrounding Moffitt Field). Hence, drone flight above my house would require notification in advance to the Palo Alto airport operator and tower, even if the drone never flies out past the properly line.
A convenient airspace-location map (provisioned with the current FAA data) is available to drone operators at
That's a non-sequiteur. The one does not follow from the other.
It doesn't mean that they can do anything they want. It does mean that they have the legal authority to restrict or regulate some things that _you_ might want to do in that airspace.
As Spock would say, "illogical".
The rules about flying in FAA-designated (or other-government- restricted) airspace aren't imposed by manufacturers of the drones, nor by Communist China. They're declared, and enforced, by the FAA, a regulatory body of the democratically-elected United States government. They're a matter of public record, available for inspection on the Internet, and they aren't hard to find.
If you don't like the regs, you can act democratically to try to change them.
Ok but as I explained it can run any program. When you better like Prezi or similar it is no problem. Your touch on the screen is translated to a mouse move to that point and a click (or double-click when you double-tap it).
I'm not sure what the final price was. We first had a very large one (86" I guess) which was 4K and I seem to remember it was about 8000 euro. That one was on trial and we finally bought a slightly smaller one that is 2K (HD) and 75" I think. But these were bought about 4 years ago and of course prices have dropped since then. I now see prices around 3000 on their site, excluding the PC module.
Yes that can be done, but on the Prowise you can do the whiteboard on the screen itself and then there is no need to photograph it, you just store it as an image. You can load the image of your PCB and then "draw" on it, then store the result. Probably you can even run the PCB design program and use its trace highlighting functions etc.
Yes it sure can do a lot of things... but basically it is just a monitor with touch input and a (optional) PC integrated with it. (you can also connect your laptop via HDMI and USB and the touch input is seen by your laptop as mouse inputs just like with the built-in PC)
It also has a built-in DVD player so you can play DVD video. This is independent from the PC option.
She freaked out when she had to take a laptop to the conference room, connect it to a beamer using a VGA cable and had to select the VGA output on her laptop to put the picture on the beamer and wait a couple of seconds before the beamer recognizes that and shows the picture. That was way above her capabilities and patience. Fortunately she has moved on to other challenges as has left us rejoicing. She had absolutely no computer literacy yet she was always criticizing the IT infrastructure. Of course she had problems with the Prowise as well, but she was the only one. Everyone else is very happy.
I'm sure there exist other manufacturers of similar solutions. They are also used as "electronic blackboards" in schools etc.
Thank you - that very page cites the same point I was making: "Notify the airport and air traffic control tower prior to flying within 5 miles of an airport*".
That is _specifically_ one of the FAA-defined controlled airspaces I referred to. It says nothing about "Notify... if you're going to fly beyond the bounds of your private property."
That's a different issue, I believe.
Causby was specifically about whether a property owner had the right to control (or be compensated for) flights by _other_ people through portions of the airspace above the owner's property (below the altitude defined by Congress as the point at which a public easement exists). That is, whether public flight through that air-space is a "taking" in the legal sense, and requires compensation.
It's not about whether a property owner has the legal right to ignore FAA regulations, when the property owner chooses to fly something within that area.
Causby affirms that the property owner has some degree of control over that airspace, but does _not_ affirm that the control is absolute and immune to government regulation. By analogy: a property owner has the right to prevent other people from trespassing on property and misusing it, but the property owner must still obey government regulations about the use of the land (zoning rules, etc.) and does not have an absolute right to use the property however he/she wants.
So, I think you are reading more into that ruling than the courts either intended or would support.
I have not heard of anyone winning a court challenge over the FAA's regulations about the requirement to provide notice when flying a drone in controlled airspace near an airport, or about the FAA's various "no fly" zones such as the one in the Washington DC area.
In practice, prosecutions are probably unlikely if you don't endanger someone... staff limitations being what they are.
However, the laws and regulations are what they are. Flying a drone above private property within the Washington DC no-fly zone, might well end one up in court.
Future court challenges and rulings may change all of this, of course.
Now that it's too late to do anything about it, here's another idea to consider. Have two separate tables with a space between them. This allows plenty of room for cables, and even space for someone to deliver coffee and doughnuts for those long meetings.
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