10 ms·

I find the airplane operators/pilot overentiteled. Why shut down 5G as some of them suggest if its the altimeters on the planes that are actually defective/not

by msh 4y ago

I find the airplane operators/pilot overentiteled. Why shut down 5G as some of them suggest if its the altimeters on the planes that are actually defective/not within spec.

twawaaay 4y ago
Ignoring reality isn't helpful. If we go this way we would have to defund highway patrols because it is waste of time (traffic rules already specify how to drive safely). You don't need IRS (because law says how to pay taxes). Also try to understand those pilots did not manufacture the equipment they are flying. They bought equipment that was certified to be airworthy or are flying for somebody who owns the equipment that was certified to be airworthy.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
- Huh1337 4y ago
  So the solution here is to go after the planes/AOC holders that have misbehaving receivers and to force them to upgrade to correctly working hardware, just like we do with cars. Even if your car is certified, it will still get pulled off the street if it misbehaves - see Dieselgate. And company drivers also don't buy the cars they drive - nobody cares.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  We are in this situation because the FAA is ignoring reality for some 50 years now. They think just doing nothing means nothing bad can ever happen; well, reality just caught up with them.
xani_ 4y ago
The airplane pilots can't do shit about it, it's up to their parent company to pressure company (and pay $$$) that sold them planes to fix it. From their perspective it worked for decades and now someone decide to jam it. From engineering perspective, yes, they are defective and don't have enough filtering on the input to stay within its band
- p_l 4y ago
  From engineering perspective, the 5G equipment is not staying in its band, not radar altimeters. Remember that the regs for band usage are on transmit, not receive, and the physical reality makes radio altimeters especially hard to filter.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    I don't think you understand FCC rules about communications at all. You can't just freely snoop on someone's cell phone call because you are just receiving. There are all kinds of regulations around reception.
    - p_l 4y ago
      And I think you do not get the rules about frequency allocation, which don't care about separate rules related to snooping communications.
  - readams 4y ago
    No the altimeters are sensitive to frequencies outside their band. So 5g transmitting inside its band causes the altimeter to malfunction.
    - teeray 4y ago
      Many receivers can be affected by strong signals outside of their band. The strange analog world has effects like desensitization and intermodulation, which can produce in-band signals or attenuate the ones you intended to hear. The degree to which a receiver is immune to these effects is part of the engineering of the receiver. They likely didn’t consider strong C-band transmissions with a high duty cycle in their design at the time.
      - p_l 4y ago
        Also in multiple threads on this before, people more versed in analog radio electronics described how problematic it is to filter.
avidphantasm 4y ago
I want the pilots who have my life and the lives of my friends and loves ones in their hands to be entitled to whatever they need to safely do their jobs.
- msh 4y ago
  Well their companies bought defective equipment, and now wants someone else to pay but not using a resource that the airplane companies are using for free. I see 3 solutions: 1: shut down 5G. 2: Ground airplanes with defective equipment 3: Make the airplane companies pay for the spectrum that their defective equipment needs to operate. Option 2 would satisfy flying safely and not put externalities on companies that had no fault in this. 3 also would but would not be very efficient.
  - mellavora 4y ago
    > Well their companies bought defective equipment No they didn't. The equipment worked just fine until people started broadcasting on a nearby frequency. Like if I put a jammer outside your living room window and your WiFi stopped working, would that be because you bought 'defective equipment'? After all, your router doesn't have the latest 'anti-jamming' error correcting codes built in.
    - msh 4y ago
      Unless I misunderstand the altimeters did not live up to the required specifications when they were produced, but as the nearby spectrum was not in use nobody really cared about this.
    - darksaints 4y ago
      It wasn't the equipment working fine that made it defective. It was the fact that they were using frequencies hundreds of MHz away from what they were allowed to use.
    - blantonl 4y ago
      The equipment is indeed defective. If your receiver is able to be overloaded by adjacent channel interference because you as the designed neglected to install a bandpass filter on such a critical piece of equipment, and it wasn't discovered until later when someone legally was granted a license to use adjacent spectrum, your equipment is WILDLY defective. Just because it took many many years to identify the failure doesn't give the manufacturers a pass. A jammer is a malicious, unlicensed product specifically designed to prevent your Wifi from working.
upofadown 4y ago
>if its the altimeters on the planes that are actually defective/not within spec. Is there any evidence this is the case? This sort of thing is a lot like property zoning. If a steel mill starts up next door to your residential property in what used to be a park then there is nothing stopping you from adding more sound proofing to your walls to make it so you can sleep. But should you have to do this and can you do this at all? In this case the neighbouring band was originally used for satellite downlinks. So barely detectable signals with large dishes required. Radar altimeters in aircraft actually used to cause interference to the satellite downlinks when the aircraft flew over. The fact is that you need to have sufficient physical separation between services in adjacent bands. In this case, you can't expect things to work if an aircraft flies directly over a 4 GHz 5G transmitter at a low altitude. This aspect of adjacent band interference is an important part of spectrum management. You can't just wave the issue away...
- crote 4y ago
  Altimeters are allowed to use the 4.2GHz - 4.4GHz band. They are getting interference from signals at 3.98GHz and below. This means they need over twice the spectrum that was allocated to them. It's more like the family who is first to move into a neighborhood under construction, complaining that their kids can no longer play in the empty lots because houses are being built there. And it's not even the empty lot next to them, but one lot over.
  - chmorgan 4y ago
    This! The altimeters with issues are not operating to their design specs. No one noticed until 5g apparently but imo it’s on the altimeters, and not 5g, if they aren’t properly rejecting out of band noise/energy.
    - ominous_prime 4y ago
      Unfortunately these altimeters are part of a very large critical infrastructure, which can't be ignored. Just saying they shouldn't be working that way doesn't negate the fact that they are working that way. Part of engineering is taking the real world into account, even if the real world is inconvenient for you.
ominous_prime 4y ago
The planes were in spec at their time of production, and in working condition before the 5g rollout. Imagine carriers installing some new technology near highways which causes cars with a device installed before 1999 to occasionally crash. You can't just say "too bad, those owners should have upgraded by now". Regardless of what the specifications say, you can't rollout new technology without taking the real world parameters into account, and these were well-known parameters before anything rolled out.
mihaaly 4y ago
Probably because less harm is done if you have lower speed for browsing than when a plane crashes or the air traffic is decimated. But I am just guessing.
awinder 4y ago
If I inject a new feature into production and it destabilizes existing functionality, it’s the new features fault (and it gets rolled back). It doesn’t matter if I really think it’s the fault of the other component, or I would have designed it differently (especially now that I know the consequences!). Maybe we end up “fixing” the existing functionality and then proceeding with the new feature — but not until stable state is re-established. This is like standard practice for shit that is of trivial importance to humanity in a newish engineering field. So I don’t for the life of me understand the logic of being more flippant when it comes to human lives in a more established engineering field.

by msh 4y ago

I find the airplane operators/pilot overentiteled. Why shut down 5G as some of them suggest if its the altimeters on the planes that are actually defective/not within spec.

twawaaay 4y ago

Ignoring reality isn't helpful. If we go this way we would have to defund highway patrols because it is waste of time (traffic rules already specify how to drive safely). You don't need IRS (because law says how to pay taxes). Also try to understand those pilots did not manufacture the equipment they are flying. They bought equipment that was certified to be airworthy or are flying for somebody who owns the equipment that was certified to be airworthy.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
Huh1337 4y ago
So the solution here is to go after the planes/AOC holders that have misbehaving receivers and to force them to upgrade to correctly working hardware, just like we do with cars. Even if your car is certified, it will still get pulled off the street if it misbehaves - see Dieselgate. And company drivers also don't buy the cars they drive - nobody cares.
stefan_ 4y ago
We are in this situation because the FAA is ignoring reality for some 50 years now. They think just doing nothing means nothing bad can ever happen; well, reality just caught up with them.

xani_ 4y ago

The airplane pilots can't do shit about it, it's up to their parent company to pressure company (and pay $$$) that sold them planes to fix it. From their perspective it worked for decades and now someone decide to jam it. From engineering perspective, yes, they are defective and don't have enough filtering on the input to stay within its band

p_l 4y ago
From engineering perspective, the 5G equipment is not staying in its band, not radar altimeters. Remember that the regs for band usage are on transmit, not receive, and the physical reality makes radio altimeters especially hard to filter.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  I don't think you understand FCC rules about communications at all. You can't just freely snoop on someone's cell phone call because you are just receiving. There are all kinds of regulations around reception.
  - p_l 4y ago
    And I think you do not get the rules about frequency allocation, which don't care about separate rules related to snooping communications.
- readams 4y ago
  No the altimeters are sensitive to frequencies outside their band. So 5g transmitting inside its band causes the altimeter to malfunction.
  - teeray 4y ago
    Many receivers can be affected by strong signals outside of their band. The strange analog world has effects like desensitization and intermodulation, which can produce in-band signals or attenuate the ones you intended to hear. The degree to which a receiver is immune to these effects is part of the engineering of the receiver. They likely didn’t consider strong C-band transmissions with a high duty cycle in their design at the time.
    - p_l 4y ago
      Also in multiple threads on this before, people more versed in analog radio electronics described how problematic it is to filter.

avidphantasm 4y ago

I want the pilots who have my life and the lives of my friends and loves ones in their hands to be entitled to whatever they need to safely do their jobs.

msh 4y ago
Well their companies bought defective equipment, and now wants someone else to pay but not using a resource that the airplane companies are using for free. I see 3 solutions: 1: shut down 5G. 2: Ground airplanes with defective equipment 3: Make the airplane companies pay for the spectrum that their defective equipment needs to operate. Option 2 would satisfy flying safely and not put externalities on companies that had no fault in this. 3 also would but would not be very efficient.
- mellavora 4y ago
  > Well their companies bought defective equipment No they didn't. The equipment worked just fine until people started broadcasting on a nearby frequency. Like if I put a jammer outside your living room window and your WiFi stopped working, would that be because you bought 'defective equipment'? After all, your router doesn't have the latest 'anti-jamming' error correcting codes built in.
  - msh 4y ago
    Unless I misunderstand the altimeters did not live up to the required specifications when they were produced, but as the nearby spectrum was not in use nobody really cared about this.
  - darksaints 4y ago
    It wasn't the equipment working fine that made it defective. It was the fact that they were using frequencies hundreds of MHz away from what they were allowed to use.
  - blantonl 4y ago
    The equipment is indeed defective. If your receiver is able to be overloaded by adjacent channel interference because you as the designed neglected to install a bandpass filter on such a critical piece of equipment, and it wasn't discovered until later when someone legally was granted a license to use adjacent spectrum, your equipment is WILDLY defective. Just because it took many many years to identify the failure doesn't give the manufacturers a pass. A jammer is a malicious, unlicensed product specifically designed to prevent your Wifi from working.

upofadown 4y ago

>if its the altimeters on the planes that are actually defective/not within spec. Is there any evidence this is the case? This sort of thing is a lot like property zoning. If a steel mill starts up next door to your residential property in what used to be a park then there is nothing stopping you from adding more sound proofing to your walls to make it so you can sleep. But should you have to do this and can you do this at all? In this case the neighbouring band was originally used for satellite downlinks. So barely detectable signals with large dishes required. Radar altimeters in aircraft actually used to cause interference to the satellite downlinks when the aircraft flew over. The fact is that you need to have sufficient physical separation between services in adjacent bands. In this case, you can't expect things to work if an aircraft flies directly over a 4 GHz 5G transmitter at a low altitude. This aspect of adjacent band interference is an important part of spectrum management. You can't just wave the issue away...

crote 4y ago
Altimeters are allowed to use the 4.2GHz - 4.4GHz band. They are getting interference from signals at 3.98GHz and below. This means they need over twice the spectrum that was allocated to them. It's more like the family who is first to move into a neighborhood under construction, complaining that their kids can no longer play in the empty lots because houses are being built there. And it's not even the empty lot next to them, but one lot over.
- chmorgan 4y ago
  This! The altimeters with issues are not operating to their design specs. No one noticed until 5g apparently but imo it’s on the altimeters, and not 5g, if they aren’t properly rejecting out of band noise/energy.
  - ominous_prime 4y ago
    Unfortunately these altimeters are part of a very large critical infrastructure, which can't be ignored. Just saying they shouldn't be working that way doesn't negate the fact that they are working that way. Part of engineering is taking the real world into account, even if the real world is inconvenient for you.

ominous_prime 4y ago

The planes were in spec at their time of production, and in working condition before the 5g rollout. Imagine carriers installing some new technology near highways which causes cars with a device installed before 1999 to occasionally crash. You can't just say "too bad, those owners should have upgraded by now". Regardless of what the specifications say, you can't rollout new technology without taking the real world parameters into account, and these were well-known parameters before anything rolled out.

mihaaly 4y ago

Probably because less harm is done if you have lower speed for browsing than when a plane crashes or the air traffic is decimated. But I am just guessing.

awinder 4y ago

If I inject a new feature into production and it destabilizes existing functionality, it’s the new features fault (and it gets rolled back). It doesn’t matter if I really think it’s the fault of the other component, or I would have designed it differently (especially now that I know the consequences!). Maybe we end up “fixing” the existing functionality and then proceeding with the new feature — but not until stable state is re-established. This is like standard practice for shit that is of trivial importance to humanity in a newish engineering field. So I don’t for the life of me understand the logic of being more flippant when it comes to human lives in a more established engineering field.