Yep, I was thinking about taxes and got locked on the name by mistake...Muh bad...Intuit, Insitu...uggg...
But when you state that the FAA is mearly gathering information about how it is working in an entirely different realm of airspace and its controlled environment...Not a lot of civilian traffic in Iraq or Afganistan...Its pretty much all military, and handled as such, even if there are civilians (and possibly non-military cargo) aboard those flights...
Like I said in some of the posts above, the FAA is getting chipped away at by this industry, on a lot of different levels...You are right, it is only a matter of time...
Whether it is a premier UAV company or a smaller market start up organization, doesn’t make much difference...Everyone wants to niche out a piece of the pie here...And thats capitalism at its finest...I have no quarrel with that...
Just because one “cop shop” has given up on them tealls me that the effort is just not at the government level...
Somebody is putting the bug in certain people that this is a fabulous idea...And the mnore they keep pounding this into peoples thick skulls of mush, the more chances they will get to try and sell the idea...
I appreciate your inside knowledge and correcting me on some points...No skin off my back at all...
Question though...Lost signal protocols seem to have an industry standard flight profile that forces them to gain altitude and orbit to re-aquire the control signal(s) inputs...
I assume that that program can be adjusted to work withing the FAA guidelines around their airspace???
Which means the control signals would have to be trunked through other transmitting sites arouns the country right???
Succeptable to interception and spoofing??? Possibly???
Just curious...
The real issue is how to keep the UAV away from other users. If sense and avoid can not be solved in a practical manner (and it wont for some time IMO), then the UAV will have to carry a fairly sophisticated 3-D map of where it is allowed and where it is not. Not hard, but not trivial either. Remember that the hardware and data need to be robust since there are lives at stake.
If you are concerned about hamming, another key issue is GPS. If it goes down or is lost, that kind of UAV is clueless as to where it is. Most do not have inertial navigation systems due to cost and weight
In terms of control stations, there are means of doing hand offs between control stations and doing relaying. No magic there. If someone was spoofing or jamming command radios, the FCC would be on it rapidly, since its a serious safety issue. That said, its doable, all it take are watts. Presumptively the control signals themselves are authenticated and encrypted to insure that a hostile takeover is not possible.