Can somebody explain why we can’t have ADS-B weather on our ipads in Europe as they have in the USA?
Cause nobody operates the ground stations required. Would have to build lots of them all across Europe and integrate them with the German French, British, European met office — damn such a thing doesn’t even exist!
Also the US use a separate frequency for the ADS-B uplink which is not spec’ed in Europe and the standard 1090 MHz might not have the capacity to do it.
ADS-B is not the solution in Europe. Mobile phones and sat phones are.
OK Achima,how do I get a weather picture on my mobile in flight?
Why we don’t have ADSB UAT in Europe
Maybe this question has already been answer earlier, but I still can’t understand why here in the EU we can’t enjoy free weather and traffic data transmitted over UAT (Universal Access Transceiver)? Who has made decision not to implement this standard in EU or another words who has decision making power to implement it? Is it EASA or Eurocontroll or somebody else?
I totally agree, America tempted people into installing ADSB in and out as they would also benefit from weather. They now have decent traffic warnings as well.
The (dysfunctional) E.U. think it is more important to create a load of extra 8.33 frequencies which models showed were probably not required if there had been some some coordination. Such a shame we are not following America on this one.
Apparently (and this is an over-simplification), the frequencies needed by UAT are in confliction with a small handful of DME stations across Europe.
So it could probably have been solved with a bit of willpower but I think that ship has long since sailed now.
I think that the US is the only country that provides services from the ADS-B ground stations with TISB and FISB. TISB is available on both 1090ES and UAT, whereas FISB is only available on UAT due to the higher band width requirements. In other countries, my understanding is that the ground station don’t provide any services, they are to be served.
IMHO the simple answer is that in the USA the FAA used a carrot rather than a stick to get adoption, whereas in Europe a carrot is not required when the EU can simply pass a law to which nobody can object 
Even big interests have almost no lobby power and GA’s is around absolute zero.
An additional dimension is that the FAA has a mandate to support aviation in all its forms whereas in Europe there is basically zero mandate to support GA in any form. Here, GA exists in the VFR form because it gets no automatic access to CAS (which is a huge political factor), and it exists in the IFR form because of ICAO membership by most countries, coupled with the very tiny population of GA actually doing it.
The UAT traffic data could have been provided in Europe as TIS on Mode S, but wasn’t due to my first paragraph.
Just my opinion, you understand
UAT was in my opinion created to make ADS-B politically possible in the US. It does this by (1) not requiring Mode S transponders, which was battle long lost by US regulators and (2) incorporating in the UAT regulation the ability to turn off tracking by tail number. Those factors are not as politically necessary outside of the US. The additional ADS-B data provided by UAT was I think intended to be icing on the cake of political acceptability.
Although obvious to nearly everyone politically tuned in, I think it likely that nothing except the gingerbread extras were discussed openly in negotiations with GA stakeholders.
Those factors are not as politically necessary outside of the US
It is interesting to wonder whether the “Mode S wars” in Europe were driven by concerns over
or over basic privacy (big brother surveillance kind of stuff).
Sites like FR24 were not around back then. If Mode S was proposed today, one would think that it would be objected to strongly on privacy grounds. However any “privacy” argument looks like an admission that the pilot is doing something illegal and therefore he doesn’t have a leg to stand on morally Maybe that really is a big difference between Europe and the USA.
