Wireless

[agabriel at coe.neu.edu (Anthony J. Gabrielson)]

Hello,
	GPS equipment for planes is very expensive.  The majority of the
equipment is IFR certified and is in the 10 thousand dollar price range,
last time I checked.  After you pay the instrument guy $70 an hour to
install it you then need to get your plane re-weighed.  That GPS could
take all weekend to get done right.  On top of that I think once a year
or twice a year you need to get the gps certified again. Plus the FAA
would have to upgrade their systems, the faa never upgrades their systems.
It would definitely be a nightmare to get planes out fitted with all of
that. If john was smart he would have held off to till the morning - their
are often bad flight conditions during the day and at night at the
vineyard and nantucket, during the day he would at least be in situation
he knew with light instead of darkness.  John had very few hours and had
no business making that flight at the time he did, at the very least he
should have filed a flight plan with the FAA.  

Anthony

On Wed, 21 Jul 1999, John Chambers,,,781-647-1813 wrote:

> 
> 	As soon as Jerry gets his DSL lines installed, I will report the details. As I 
> 	mentioned, he is dropping his phone in favor of 100% wireless, which 
> 	makes sense in his case. 
> 
> It'd be interesting to hear the war  stories  about  wireless  links.
> I've  been  interested  in  this  for  some time.  I even worked on a
> wireless project some years back (for  a  Motorola  subsidiary),  but
> then it didn't seem at all ready for prime time.
> 
> I've long thought that wireless  (radio  and/or  IR)  had  a  lot  of
> potential  advantages.   It  occurred to me again this weekend, while
> listening to the frantic media coverage of  the  JFK-Jr  story.   Why
> didn't  they have a precise location for the plane?  GPS equipment is
> cheap these days, and most planes have it.   You  can  interface  GPS
> equipment  to  computers.   The only missing part is the IP link to a
> computer not on the plane, so that the records  aren't  lost  if  the
> plane is damaged. You have a little program that asks the GPS for the
> current coordinates every N seconds, and appends the data  to  a  log
> file  on  the remote system.  Then if the plane is lost, you just run
> tail on the logfile, and you know where it was when the computer lost
> power.   Is  there anything here that's not doable with off-the-shelf
> hardware and a small program?  The critical part seems to be  whether
> you can make the wireless IP work.
> 
> (A quick check with man shows that the linux syslogd reads  from  the
> standard  syslog=514/udp  port,  implying  that  it is indeed able to
> accept messages from remote clients.  But the man  pages  for  things
> like openlog don't contain any clues about how a client program sends
> a message to a remote syslogd. So it looks like this would have to be
> discovered  and  documented for the above scheme to be usable.  Or we
> could just write a special-purpose "GPSd" server; it'd only be a  few
> lines in perl.)
> 
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