Martin – WirelessMoves

NFC Payment in the Paris Metro

It took many many years, but I finally used an NFC payment service on a mobile device: For paying in the Paris metro! So how well does this work and how does it compare to other cities?

Digitization – More Complicated?

To me, digitization is something out of the 1980’s, but it seems to be a resurrected topic in the 2020’s. In my opinion, digitization should strive to make things simpler instead of more complicated for the customer. Unfortunately, in reality, many services that are digitized are often just as complicated or even more so than than their analog predecessors. There is one exception that comes to my mind, however, and that is how one can pay in the London metro. It’s so simple that I’ve come to see it as the ‘gold standard’ of a service that was digitized. So let’s have a look at London Transport first and then compare the system used by the Paris metro.

Reality Bites – Flight Simulation – Part 10 – Moving to ‘the Bus’

It was predictable in some way that sooner or later, I would want to do yet another ‘upgrade’ in the flight simulator and move to something bigger. After the turboprop Daher TBM-930, which I started flying last year, it was either a private yet or an airliner. There is lots of choice and in the end, I decided to go for an airliner. The big choice to make at this point then is: Airbus or Boeing!? In the end, I decided to go for an Airbus A320 and here again, there are several implementations to choose from: In the Asobo / MS flight simulator, one can choose the A320 that comes with the simulator itself, the open source FlyByWire A320neo or the closed source and not for free Fenix A320ceo. After some investigation, I came to the conclusion that I’d skip the default A320 and go straight for something with more ‘system depth’. Both the FlyByWire and the Fenix A320 seem to be fantastic products and, contrary to my open source nature, I decided to go for the Fenix A320 first. At 50 British pounds, it is very affordable and is said to have an unrivaled system depth, i.e. pretty much everything the real plane does works in the simulator as well. I have no idea how that could be done for 50 GBP, but I was eager to find out.

Wi-Fi AP Handover and Real Time Services

Earlier this year when I was on vacation in the Austrian alps, I noticed an interesting Wi-Fi behavior that I thought I should note down here for future reference: The impact of a handover from one Wi-Fi access point to another in a distributed system.

Reality Bites – Flight Simulation – Part 9 – Satellite Communication in Planes

There obviously had to come a time when the interests of the wireless network engineer in me and my enthusiasm for flying in the simulator cross paths. Even small general aviation aircraft have lots of radios on board these days and if you go up the price range a bit, there are even built-in satellite communication options available. And when moving up the scale to airliners, satellite communication for voice calls and data exchange is a standard feature. So let’s have a look at these capabilities.

A SIM Card vs. the Apollo Guidance Computer

I’m a bit of a fanboy of the Apollo moon program of the 1960s, so a recent post by Nick comparing the computing power of a typical SIM card today with the Apollo Guidance computer of the 1960 definitely sparked my interest!

Going Car-Less – Half a Year Later

Half a year ago, I decided to retire my car I had for 22 years and not to buy a new one. As I live in Cologne in Germany, I don’t need a car to get around in the city, but suddenly not having a car was something quite unfamiliar. So how does the situation look like half a year later?

Reality Bites – Flight Simulation – Part 8 – Radios In Planes

When flying in the simulator, I’m quite amazed how many radios a modern GA airplane or airliner has on board. Sometimes, it feels more like a flying radio tower than an airplane. The picture above and below shows the antennas of a Daher TBM 930 turbo-prop plane on its roof and its underside. Needless to say that all radio systems are not only used in reality, but also in the simulation, particularly when flying on Vatsim. So what are all those antennas for?

Streaming Approved Metros

These days, I’d say that the majority of underground metros do have 4G and 5G network coverage. There are a few inglorious cities that haven’t gotten their act together for years now, but let’s not talk about them today. Let’s rather talk about the positive examples, i.e. those metros that have gone the next step.

When All Else Fails – The Garmin InReach Mini 2 – Part 13 – Hearing Iridium

I’m sure you’ve heard the typical ‘GSM sound’ on an FM radio by chance when a phone call comes in and the phone was close to a radio. It doesn’t happen that much anymore of course, as devices are mostly camping on LTE and 5G networks these days. But if you manually select GSM, you can still hear it today. So I was wondering if I could also ‘hear’ Iridium uplink transmissions of my Garmin InReach Mini 2 on the radio?

EU-Alert – Will It Stop Alerting Eventually?

Recently, two federal states in Germany tested their EU-Alerting System implementation. Based on the cell broadcast mechanism that exists in all 3GPP network technologies since the the days of GSM, it makes phones emit a loud warning signal and shows a message on the screen. It definitely does wake one up, as I already discovered in 2016 in the Netherlands when they had one of their regular test runs of their system.

So while one is inclined to confirm and thus silence the alert as quickly as possible, I wondered if it would eventually stop on its own. Why? Well, every now and then I do have a phone lying around at home while I’m not there. It would be pretty unfair to the neighbors if it kept alerting indefinitely. So I collected a number of different phones and didn’t touch them once the alerts got going. And indeed, after 5 minutes, they all dropped silent simultaneously. Good for the neighbors!