FANET and FLARM: who actually sees you in the air

Every pilot who looks at a FANET device asks the same fair question: this is nice, but will the gliders see me? The answer takes more than one word, because three different protocols are involved and they do three different jobs.

What FANET actually gives you

FANET is pilot to pilot. You appear on the instruments of everyone around you who speaks it, and they appear on yours. Ground stations of the Open Glider Network pick you up too, so your track is visible from the ground. Because the protocol also carries climb rate, a screen full of nearby pilots doubles as a map of where the lift is.

There is more in it than position. FANET can broadcast your name, share a thermal you have found, declare what you are doing — paraglider, sailplane, walking — and send an SOS. That last one is a distress beacon already sitting in the radio you are carrying.

One detail matters in a crowded thermal: FANET slows itself down as the sky fills up. The more neighbours around you, the less often each device transmits, so the shared channel stays usable. Hobby firmwares that beacon at a fixed rate work fine on a quiet hill and choke the channel in a gaggle of fifteen. Ours follows the spec.

Why there is no FLARM in our devices

FLARM is what gliders and powered aircraft carry, and the line here is legal rather than technical.

Receiving and decoding FLARM is fine — that is how every OGN ground station works. Transmitting a FLARM packet is what requires a commercial licence and an assigned radio ID. Our radio could physically send those packets; we choose not to. A hobby build with nobody carrying liability is one thing, a flight instrument sold in the EU is another.

The legal route exists: buy the licensed FLARM OEM module and embed it. That is what several European manufacturers do, and it brings a second chip with its own firmware on an update schedule we would not control. Devices with two update paths, one of them out of your hands, age badly.

So the gap people keep pointing at — a cheap standalone FLARM — is a legal gap, not an engineering one. Better firmware cannot close it.

What this means for you

If you fly where FLARM is effectively mandatory, carry FLARM. FANET does not make you visible to a glider, and we have never claimed it does. What FANET gives you is the other half of the sky: the pilots around you, the lift they are finding, and a distress call that does not need a phone.

For most paraglider pilots that is exactly the half that matters, because the traffic you actually share a thermal with is other paragliders.

What comes next

ADS-L is the protocol meant to make everyone interoperable, and it is closer than it looks. OGN ground stations across Europe already decode it, and FLARM’s own modules are gaining ADS-L transmission as a paid extension. For us it is a software question on hardware that is already capable — the FANET Vario ships with the radio it needs.

The full reasoning, including how we read the licence and why LoRa keeps FANET from ever becoming the European standard, is written up in detail on our workshop blog: FLARM, FANET and ADS-L — where the line actually is.