The guys who did the field testing of Capstone in western Alaska sure did approve of it. Total POS? Maybe from your naive right to privacy point of view, but from the aircraft fleet operator's point of view? it's amazing. I sure like seeing the surface winds on my G3X screen. Where I fly that's pretty damn cool.
I don't recall any us us having a constitutional right to fly, let alone a right to fly anonymously. But for those who hate the ADS-B concept? Move out of the cities. Stay out of classified airspace. Live free. The regulations have provided the option.
Just because a design is a POS doesn’t make it non-useful. It’s just an engineering analysis of it.
Well, I guess everyone needs to have something to worry about. Someone watching me on ADS-B ain't on my list, but to each their own.
You’ve probably never been stalked. Stalked by someone intent on stalking for no reason whatsoever other than the fact that they have a completely broken brain and need to be isolated from society but can’t be, because they “haven’t done anything illegal yet”.
I do hope you never get to “enjoy” that insanity. And insanity it is.
Look at it this way. Got a daughter? Think if she bought an airplane and went places with it that everyone needs to know where that airplane goes at all times? Do they even need to know when she has to fly in ADS-B required airspace?
How about in her car? If the city decided to publish all the plate reading equipment and locations of all vehicles those see passing them and said it was for “safety” (when there’s clearly no safety reason for that) and just published it without announcement, and also had all of the information broadcast in the clear with no encryption over hundreds of miles for no reason whatsoever, would you call that a good design of a data system they claim to “need”?
There’s levels of stupidity in information tracking and this one is waaaaaay up there. Remember, ADS-B for the billions spent hasn’t met a single public goal it had, yet.
It was supposed to be for cramming more aircraft into airspace, per the public reasoning for paying for it, which was already limited by time, speed, distance, and see and avoid timeframes. The public goal keeps changing to obfuscate that it has absolutely nothing to do with traffic management.
And all of the “nice to have” features like weather are provided only on an “as able” basis. They’re secondary or tertiary to the tracking function.
The tracking function wasn’t even capable of handling all of the traffic in certain required areas at the time of design. Worked as Capstone in Alaska but when it went “oooh, we can get billions and force this garbage nation-wide) all of a sudden you have to bolt on UAT to even make the thing handle the traffic load.
It’s truly a POS, design-wise. No proper identification or repudiation of received transmissions, antenna blockages in many modes where safety is “assumed” but not properly guaranteed by a rebroadcast of the ground station, the asinine “hockey puck” that drives safety right out the window just to save on air time, the thing of discreet codes that never change to N-numbers broadcasting it all in the clear without encryption, dual frequency and diddling with ground stations having to figure out which things to rebroadcast on which transmitter... the list goes on.
It’s just a system where some bureaucrat shoved some loan money through in Alaska to various entities and came up with something that at best was a good stop-gap for the lack of information and control up there, and then realized they could make a multi-billion dollar land-grab by forcing it on the rest of CONUS — without doing a proper design for what might actually be needed, proper bandwidth for the data expected, and no need whatsoever to broadcast anything in the clear in a command and control/safety system.
The only good news is it only ran the deficit up by small double digit billions instead of triple digit, of they’d have done a real design and needs analysis and been honest about system capabilities when pitching it to Congress.
Example: Why the hell isn’t a tracked D-ATIS request system and requested clearance delivery included in this system, and yet available from AIRINC on private systems and frequencies for decades now? Because it wasn’t DESIGNED properly as an aviation two-way data system. It was designed as an add-on to transponders and Mode-S and you can see the “bolt on” mentality in the design if you’ve done any systems design work. The marketing wank to pretend it’s something it can barely handle, is even funnier.
