Not that I'd noticed, I'd already blocked the bloke before he flipped the table.
OP is just flexing. He'll either deliver a product, or he won't. Either way, he's not going to fill my face in, or see me in court. I'll be astonished if he files so much as a design patent, let alone a functional one. We can enjoy the brief frisson of drama while it lasts though, that's what the intarwebs are for.
If you're going to re-invent something that's already been released and failed, something needs to be different, either with the features, the price or the market.
It is a fair point that airsoft has come on since 2009 - more folk running comms, tracers, even NODS, and sites prepared to invest in props and things like AttackSense.
I've had a
look at the spec of the MT1268 and it looks reasonable enough: GPS for position[*],
LPD433 (at an unspecified power) for unit-to-unit communication. However, that limits it to outside use, and liable to interference from (e.g.) folk flying drones. If that's 10mW LPD then a 500m range would be very optimistic, and essentially line-of-sight, thereby obviating much of the point of it as a find-the-McGuffin tracker. Consider that PMR runs at 500mW.
The kicker was the price: $250 per non-water-resistant unit, i.e. $500 before you can do anything with them on a site. It's no wonder it vanished without trace.
Given the tiny potential market, I'd sack off the idea of dedicated hardware and look at doing it as a phone app instead. There are already "family tracker" style apps that seem to fit the bill, and it wouldn't be super hard to roll your own. The issue would be sharing phone locations fast enough to be useful: you'd need a location with decent mobile data coverage, and then you'd have to provide hosting and "matchmaking" services, getting updates out to connected devices quickly enough, and with enough location resolution, to be useful. There's also the obvious risk of getting your screen shot out in-game.
You could give the app away and charge a subscription for hosting. Doing it the other way around, a paid app and free service, would be a risky buy as it would likely collapse as soon as sales plateau.
It's not a terrible idea, it might actually work. But anybody can have an idea. Following through to market - and long term support, once the orders dry up - is the tricky part.
[*]You can forget the idea of using any sort of signal strength for estimating even distance, let alone direction. It comes up every so often, the NHS track-and-trace app tries it over bluetooth with pretty poor results. I was involved in a failed project to try and track phone locations (and thus crowd density) in stadia and concert venues using bluetooth and wifi discovery signals with multiple receivers at known locations. We never got anything close to usable fidelity, even with a short range line-of-sight setup, let alone with walls and such in the way.
