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Comment by wrath224 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of this makes sense if you add some smart regulation. Drones over a certain weight class should be transmitting ADSB out if they plan to fly outside line of sight. ADSB in could be optional. If your drone is flying outside line of sight, it's most likely large enough and big enough to be able to transmit. Everyone benefits from that sort of case from pilots to drone operators. Will be interesting to see for sure.

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Sure, ADS-B can help. But as of today, there are still some light and ultralight crewed aircraft flying around without ADS-B in certain classes of airspace or altitude ranges.

well, it's absolutely logical that ADSB should be installed on 300 gr drones. because everybody wants to know where they are. also another one on pilot. because he may be alone and still have something to share... I'm thinking about getting a gun, just in case..

I think a sensible approach would be to allow these larger/automated drones only in class C, or extend the adsb mandate to ultralights.

Alternatively, maybe it's time to push them to have a lighter, non certified version of ADSB for light aircraft/drones and mandate a price requirement for a mobile transponder/receiver under 1k. If apple can sell an AirTag for $20, there isn't any reason we couldn't get the prices of longer range beacons down.

> there isn't any reason we couldn't get the prices of longer range beacons down.

The electronics aren't why the beacons are expensive, it's the regulations. Your proposal is to add more?

For numerous technical reasons, ADS-B itself is not suitable for low-flying small UAS. Technical reasons include but are not limited to the following:
- Lack of support for the 1090 MHz ADS-B channel on any consumer handheld devices
- Cost, Size, Weight and Power (CSWaP) requirements of ADS-B transponders on CSWaP constrained UA
- Limited bandwidth of both uplink and downlink, which would likely be saturated by large numbers of UAS, endangering manned aviation

Understanding these technical shortcomings, regulators worldwide have ruled out the use of ADS-B for the small UAS for which UAS RID and DRIP are intended.

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-drip-arch-31.html

That’s dumb. ADSB is the standard for aviation now. Make it work on drones, don’t try and make some new standard. Pretty sure uAvionix had already solved this way back in 2015 when I was in the industry.

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