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Cringely: Wi-Fi in the Sky
Boiled Frog writes "In Cringely's latest article, he describes his plan to test a wi-fi connection between his house and his plane using two LinkSys 802.11g routers. He plans to experiment with various antennas to see which works the best."
Sometimes, this Cringely guy just makes me cringe...
He takes a rather quick review of the geek-unfriendly regulations in the sky, and then simply says that because he doesn't believe in them he's going to openly ignore them.
At least he'll be using his own plane, so the only life he's risking in this situation is his own and maybe one or two willing others. Part of the reason why the FAA is over-sensative over what's going on within commerical airplanes is because if the unthinkable random frequency collision were to happen, it might cause an instrument to give a wrong reading to the pilot and the result would be hundreds of people being killed. That's rather high stakes to be guessing...
In sad but related news, Robert Cringely passed away today in a private plane crash. Investigators blame bad weather and the fact that Mr. Cringely was Surfing The Damn Internet while aloft.
Please bid on this Karmann Ghia! Please pleas
Someday somebody's going to have to explain the whole war-driving/war-flying type thing to me... I really don't see the appeal in doing all this seemingly pointless stuff with wireless just to watch a few numbers fluctuate on a laptop. (I'm sure a lot of you think I should be banned from slashdot for saying that though). (Also, who names their kid "channing?" or "cole" for that matter? The quality of child naming has really gone down of late...)
What an insensitive thing to say.
Learn some manners, michael.
The latest Slashdot meme.
Right now, many aviation headsets come equipped to work with your regular mobile phone, suggesting that at this moment there are probably hundreds or thousands of people flying around in little planes and yacking their heads off. Yet for some reason the mobile phone companies don't seem to be complaining. Have you heard any complaints?
A few rare rulebreakers won't have as much affect on the network as if the rule was repealed and everybody on the plane was doing it. If 200 people on a plane flying overhead are on their cell phones, that'll be a much different situation than what's never really been tested.
-mse
Fiat Lux.
Sorry Bob, someone beat you to it.
But i'd still be interested to see the results of a bi-directional test..
I'm not sure about anyone else, but when I'm flying between Chicago and Boston I never have any cell reception on my phone when we're in the air.
... wants to deduct his flying expenses.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
I must say, this sounds like an excellent idea, but what about those rural areas where planes don't always fly, and what about if an airport grounds flights for any length of time, such as happened on 9/11? It seems to me that a better solution must be found if we're to obtain reliable network connectivity from such a system, as opposed to just cheap spotty access. But if nothing else, I give credit to Cringley for some very interesting ideas about the possibilities!
plan to test a wi-fi connection between his house and his plane...
Yes, and I'm about to test my wi-fi roaming capability from my rocket car in the Bonneville flats. Next week, I'm going to test the reception distance of my Pringle's can antenna from the deck of my 75' yacht on my way to the Bahamas to my other beach house....
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Some guy in his own homebuilt plane, flying in unrestrcited airspace VFR trying to work out answers to questions a lot of pilots have.
If the Wright brothers were alive today, they'd still be completing the paperwork to build an airplane.
Seems like I remember Boeing taking up one of their planes loaded with electronics equipment, trying to test out this interference issue. They got zero interference. But it is always possible. Somebody needs to put this whole line of fear-mongering to rest. Godspeed to the guy.
Cringely consistently discusses radio with inaccurate technical descriptions. I've been on email threads in which he responds to critics who try to get him to be more accurate with statements about how he's trying to popularize technology and that people should just try interesting, weird things. From his never-again-discussed passive billboard antenna -- against the laws of physics and he never provided promised details to the Bay Area Wireless User's Group -- to his Why-Fi proposal (completely prima facie unrealistic and contradictory) to his "stick an antenna up at maximum gain and serve a neighborhood" essays a few weeks ago...
Well, why does he get Slashdot's attention any more?
Oh, I forget. As he said in that string of email I mention, he has 200,000 readers, thus making him an expert.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Picture yourself as a packet on a signal,
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody SYNS you, you ACK quite slowly,
A Port with kaleidoscope eyes.
LCD flowers of yellow and green,
Towering over your head.
Look for the Port with the sun in her eyes,
And she's gone.
WIFI in the sky with diamonds.
WIFI in the sky with diamonds.
He mentions that there are up to 1000 small IFR aircraft in the air in the USA at any one time and that these could have a mesh network between them and this could provide a cellular network for planes. I think not somehow, as he states in the article mesh networks only work effecitvely with 3 hops or less and that a reasonable range is 10km using directional antennas.
Firstly all 1000 planes aren't going to carry signals and the ones that do will need to be in range of a base station on the ground. In order to keep a connection going these planes would have to be constantly adjusting their antennas to point at ground stations and at the other plane.
Secondly at certain times of day/certain (most) places there won't be enough planes to give the range. Perhaps above major cities you can guarentee coverage most of the time, but elsewhere you won't be able to.
Thirdly, I doubt 1000 planes (flying their usualy patterns) could provide anywhere near 100% coverage of the air corridors in the USA. And you'll still need a base station every 30km, isn't this about what the current solutions use if not more?
I love the way Cringely always takes concepts like this over the top strecting them far beyond what is pratical.
I'm sorry, I don't buy this. If planes are so reliant on all these telemetry signals that a bunch of electronic devices in the cabin could cause them to crash because the pilots cannot possibly look at the instruments, look out the window, and figure out something's wrong, I don't know how any airline managed to stay in business or keep any sort of plane in the air before, say, 1995. Without GPS and the (incredibly consistent) global air-traffic radar systems, why, you couldn't so much as fly a plane over a country with whom your at war to drop a bomb.
It depends on your flight conditions. I assume Cringely is flying VFR (Visual Flight Rules), so if he is a competent pilot familiar with the aircraft, he should theoretically be able to fly his aircraft without any instruments (of course, landing without an airspeed indicator can get your pulse going a little).
However, an airline (or private plane) flying IFR (instrument flight rules) in the soup NEEDS a working attitude indicator and other navigational equipment, as well as communication with ATC, in order to fly safely. The AI allows you to keep the right side of the plane up when you can't see the horizon outside (had JFK Jr. not been such an arrogant, reckless imbecel and had the proper training, this knowledge could well have saved his life), the navigational equipment helps you go where you belong and avoid obsticles you can't see due to clouds, like radio towers and mountains, and the communications with ATC keeps you from hitting someone else flying in the same cloud.
His radio equipment isn't going to affect his gyro and vacuum gear at all (so he won't lose his attitude indicator, airspeed indicator, altimeter, or what have you), but it could very well interfere with navigational and communcations equipment (I've had my cell phone completely jam my comms on one occasion, and while that is rare, it does happen. It happened to me, on the ground while trying to get ATIS, before I turned it off). That could well be a problem if he's flying over a major city talking to ATC and doesn't realize he isn't hearing what they are telling him.
The upshot of all of this? If he's VFR and doing it in an area where he doesn't have to talk to ATC, then, assuming he's a competent pilot who has a passenger messing with the radio gear while he does what he is supposed to be doing -- flying the plane -- he shouldn't have any real trouble. Other than violating various FCC regulations, of course, but that is between him and the FCC.
If he's doing this while required to talk to ATC, he's being foolish. If he's on an IFR flight plan while doing this, he's almost as stupid as JFK Jr.
My bet is on the first scenerio.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
A few years ago, I was doing some contract work for a company that does the installs for some of the GSM base stations here in Australia.
During a conversation with one of the techs the subject of the ban on mobile phones came up. His comment was that the phone transmitters are too low powered to affect the plane's systems, but that if 300 passengers on a plane travelling at 400kmh+ all had phones on, the handover process from cell to cell would be swamped and there would be a trail of crashed cellular base stations behind each passenger plane.
Better than crashing the planes, but still enough of a problem to insist on a ban on phones, and if you want people to co-operate, linking their cooperation to their own safety is about as good an incentive as you're going to get.
A light plane travelling at 200kph won't cause the same problem, so nobody worries about enforcing the ban for them.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Since the plane is mobile, a fixed directional antenna won't help much (though one that directed most energy upward from the ground station and one that pointed generally down from the plane would be better than an isotropic radiator). A moving antenna that tracks the aircraft's transponder or an APRS device might be reasonable, but difficult to build. What might work better is to use a 200 mw card (like one from zcomax or senao - most cards are about 35mw to allow greater spacial reuse). Or you could use an external 1 watt amplifier.
I'm more interested in the routing protocols for connection handoffs between base stations. AODV and DSR were shown experimentally to handle extremely high mobility of large numbers of nodes.
-jim