And what kind of subscription do you use? What’s the best deal for us pilots?
For data transfer, all Thuraya tariffs have the same price. The most flexible and cost effective plan is called “NOVA”. It’s a prepaid system where you charge the card with “Thurarya Dollars”. It’s best to buy them with an online supplier in the US (funnily enough that is possible even though Thuraya does not work in the US) at roughly USD 1.1 per Thurraya Dollar.
One MB of data costs 3.5 Thuraya Dollars, the billing unit is 100kb. You will pretty soon realize that it is not smart to use existing applications such as weather apps. I have created my own service which I’ve optimized down to the last byte of transfer.
Maybe I could subscribe to your service then :-) Yes, 3.5 USD /MB is pretty expensive.
Once we all have Satphones we could start using the PIREP PRO App i just found in the iTunes appstore. I bet there’s a Android version too.
achim wrote: You will pretty soon realize that it is not smart to use existing applications such as weather apps. I have created my own service which I’ve optimized down to the last byte of transfer.
that’s the thing that still evades me, and why the ADL solution is still probably the best out there. I m not tech savvy enough to design my own radar page. Getting the taf/metars with one tap on the iphone/ipad is easy enough with Aeroweather , but frankly you can also ask ATC for those. I still havent found an easy weather radar app that is convenient to use in flight. I guess you could use Meteox or the Radar picture in Weatherpro but they are not that great either. Fiddling with browsers and www in flight is a no no. Moreover none of these are georeferenced.
Although I’d love to spend less than half of the price on a satsleeve, I actually think the ADL would be the most useful and most cost effective avionics upgrade for my aircraft, despite having old but perfectly functioning brnav avionics. OK I wish I could put an Aspen and GTN750 in it, but I think I’d benefit more from better weather avoidance gear (I have a strikefinder already).
To achimba:
What are the in flight results of the sat sleeve? Sat connexion and gps fix ? Does it still need an external antenna ? :-)
Let us know !
Best regards
Alexandre.
I will let you know, haven’t had a chance to test it in flight. Reception seems to be better than with the XT but I doubt it will be of much use without an external antenna.
Reception seems to be better than with the XT but I doubt it will be of much use without an external antenna.
We have probably spoken about this before, but my old Hughes 7100 gets a good signal anytime I hold it against a window (on the correct side of the aircraft) and a full signal if I go to the effort of pointing its antenna at the satellite (which is to the SE of “us”, overhead Madagascar). Why would the XT be much worse?
Maybe it has a noisier CPU – a major issue with all of today’s GSM phones which are all much worse on the signal level than the old Nokia 6310i (the best phone ever made) 
I get rather good signals with my XT lying on the dashboard (with the built in antenna). So I currently see no point for an external antenna.
