Status Update on FLARM for USA

We are well aware that we have stressed the patience of our fellow pilots with repeated delays and would like to apologize for this. Here’s the status as of Monday 16-May-2011.

First, the good news. The portable PowerFLARM is shipping to GA pilots in Europe, with close to 500 already delivered, and initial customer feedback has been very positive. It is real and shipping. Initially some secondary features are missing but will be available via software updates (PCAS Mode A/C display, flight recording, ADS-B target alarming and dataport output, obstacle warning, check lists).

Now for the bad news. We had difficulty with FCC testing, caused by a third party module (not by the FLARM radio…). We believe we have now found a solution which will result in successful FCC certification of the portable PowerFLARM, and will allow us to deliver portable units to USA by end of June.

Now for some worse news: The non-portable “brick” unit was delayed pending successful testing of the base design. We will now accelerate design, production and testing of this model, but realistically it will not be ready for the USA 2011 season (it will take until fall to finish design, production, and FCC testing).

And finally, some excuses: When we specified PowerFLARM we did not anticipate that merging the technologies of FLARM, PCAS, ADS-B, LCD display, internal GPS antenna and batteries would be so challenging. Our desire to design it all into the smallest and lightest possible package did not make things simpler either. Also, huge amount of effort went into making classic FLARM and PowerFLARM fully compatible; even though they run on very different processors they now share over 90% of the core RF and collision-detection code. This was possible due to the ‘mandatory update’ to firmware version 5 which all ‘classic’ FLARM had to perform after March 2011.

We will post videos of PowerFLARM in operation shortly and keep you updated on progress at least every other week.

~ The FLARM team, 16-May-2011