Comment by Squalish on February 2, 2011 at 9:05pm

This would be catastrophic for UAV usage, but I don't see how it could happen if the facts suggested here are true.  The FAA's concerns alone would snuff this, to say nothing of GPS device producers.

Comment by Duane Brocious on February 2, 2011 at 9:33pm

Someone at the FCC getting kickbacks from Lightspeed?

One member of the AMA council in the 70's stated that he personally gave $10K of the AMA's money to an FCC official to get the 72Mhz bands approved for RC use. Status Quo in the USA. BTW, I do not blame the AMA, it is the way things are in our country.

Often things get done in the USA only with someone gettting paid off. We have the best Govt money can buy.

Comment by Rory Paul on February 2, 2011 at 9:42pm

Nice anybody want to start a fund to get sUAS under 6lbs approved for civilian commercial use...I have about $2.50 and some pocket lint to chip in...

Comment by Duane Brocious on February 2, 2011 at 10:09pm

The way it looks now we will need to start a non-profit organization (CBO) for recreational sUAS with safety rules and get them accepted by the FAA. The AMA is already working on this but the AMA has already banned anything remotely resembling autonomous or semi-autonomous electronics. All they allow are stabilization electronics. Not even a guided failsafe system. Of course, the AMA is only worried about 100+ lb. planes, turbines and 3 foot metal rotor blades. Basically only the rich minority of their members get what they want in the AMA everyone else is ignored or silenced.

Comment by Duane Brocious on February 2, 2011 at 10:11pm

BTW, many in the AMA would like to see all arial cameras banned, let alone FPV.

Under current AMA rules the AR Parrot is illegal to use.

Comment by Squalish on February 3, 2011 at 2:04am

Back-of-napkin thoughts:

The American Unmanned Aerial Union: Fighting to protect the people's right to safe, economical unmanned flight for commercial and recreational users since 2011.

Initiatives
*Flight Safety Mapping - establishing the actual safety level and danger zones for high-resolution, real-time-updated, three-dimensional vector airspace sections, on a simple classification scale with a dozen classes at most. This involves things like exclusion of busy airspace like airport approach paths at altitude, even more than three miles away from an airport, establishment of stable areas dedicated to UAV loiter patterns for things like networking, and the establishment of different sets of safety rules for places like the near-ground-level altitudes where manned aircraft can't safely fly, the sparsely-traveled rural areas where UAVs can reasonably share all airspace, or high-altitude urban areas where plausible crash damage has to be minimized.
*The classification and rulemaking for at most a dozen categories of UAVs and several types of manned craft, including a matrix of which types of airspace they are banned in, or have to operate transponders in, or they are not allowed to loiter in. Also: Creating an ideal set of yielding rules for close aerial encounters
*A commercial operator training, licensing & high-deductible insurance program for larger vehicles, but otherwise, the same vehicles in the same airspace have the same rules.
*A program for commercial operators to exceed the normal safe airspace provisions, if they file flightplans, carry transponders, and take other precautions
*The provision of training/recreational areas, including contracted agricultural fields in areas without natural grasslands, which are dedicated to UAV use out to a reasonable distance and up to a reasonable altitude.
*The standardization of wireless control formats in order to conserve spectrum and maximize the safe vehicle density. Something like MAVLink is literall

Comment by Squalish on February 3, 2011 at 2:07am

Continuation: Something like MAVLink is literally a thousand times as conservative with spectrum as a 4 channel transmitter, to my understanding.

Comment by Krzysztof Bosak on February 4, 2011 at 1:10am

How difficult is to make a binary system guiding strictly overhead of such a powerful transmitter?

Is it possible to use GPS analog stage and 2 GPS modules on the wings, barometric as altihold,

and an egg or two to drop if magneto detects spinning around fixed point?

No HARM intended, no ALARMs to be raised.

Comment by RH1N0 on February 4, 2011 at 2:27am

 

No HARM no fowl :-)

Comment by Ken on February 17, 2011 at 7:27pm

Some updates. It is a little technical (not too bad) but has some interesting information. Aside from the technical, several big time US agencies are "expressing a number of serious concerns..."

 

http://www.gpsworld.com/survey/the-fccs-decision-lightsquared-high-...

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