The French government has proposed a new law making it mandatory for all drones to be fitted with electronic conspicuity beacons – an idea with big implications for the future of drone regulation.
The proposal, written in legal French (a translation of which can be found here) would mandate the installation of beacons on all unmanned aircraft.
It appears to be part of a public consultation exercise by a governmental agency, the Direction Générale des Enterprises (France’s version of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) on adding electronic and visual beacons to all drones weighing 800g or more, as part of recent amendments to France’s Post and Electronic Communications Code due to come into force on 1 July 2018.
The proposed beacon would run on the unlicensed 2.4GHz Wi-Fi spectrum allocation and transmit data using the rather elderly 802.11n specification. The machine-translated proposal state that the “the signaling message takes place in the payload part of the Wi-Fi frame 802.11n. The message corresponds to an 802.11n Wi-Fi frame running over a wireless network in AD HOC” and also state that the message payload must include:
- a code for the drone’s manufacturer;
- the drone’s unique serial number;
- its latitude and longitude;
- altitude;
- the latitude and longitude of its takeoff point;
- its speed;
- its heading;
- and a timestamp for all the above.
The unique manufacturer code will be a trigram issued by French authorities. Each message must be broadcast at intervals no greater than three seconds.
Also mandated will be the fitting of a light visible from 150 metres away, flashing the Morse letter U. The light must not use any of the colours presently used for manned aviation, and therefore will not be using the colours red, white or green. Interestingly, the proposals explicitly state that a single beacon will be acceptable for a swarm of drones.
Source: The Register