A lot of people have been looking (and talking about 
) this topic...
Europe's private IFR (non radar equipped) community is very small - probably of the order of a few hundred pilots who actually go anywhere. So the business case is hard.
On the plus side, we have Thuraya coverage here, which Americans don't have, so we are not forced to use the much more expensive and much slower Iridium system. If Thuraya can be made to work reliably, it will greatly reduce the costs over the commercial solutions.
I have always felt that Avidyne's MLX770 solution (Iridium based and costing c. €10k to install, plus a compatible MFD) was too pricey for most people. I know of a few pilots who bought it but all of them were blowing well into 5 digits on eye candy anyway.
Radar data is sold by the national met offices and distributed by a European unit called Opera whose job is to commercialise it. My guess is that anybody doing this (Avidyne, or Moving Terrain) is buying it from Opera.
A much cheaper way to get it would be to write some code to grab it from meteox.com (N of the Alps, up to the top of UK) and from several other national radar sites (for southern countries), and remap all the pixels onto a bitmap with a uniform projection over all of Europe, and then deliver tiles out of this bitmap which are near the georeferenced aircraft position.
Obviously this is possible technically. Years ago I even worked out a way of doing it using SMS and sprite based compression and offered the idea to a well known GA weather service provider but they weren't interested.
But whether it could ever be made to work commercially I have no idea, and I would never try it myself (commercially) because the radar sites drop off periodically and the URLs etc get changed, so you could not guarantee any level of service.
I have a private URL which presents essential wx data for satphone use (adverts etc stripped off) and at least one of the sites used by it goes dead every few months. So I have two taf/metar sources, two IR sources, etc.
One very important and very recent development has been the wifi access points for satphones and both Iridium and Thuraya are doing them. The Iridium one has been reported to be so slow as to be almost useless, which is unsuprising given the 2400bit/sec speed. These would enable more modern display devices such an the Ipad to be used.
How much investment to take the idea of this sat receiver / wifi router unit, plus cached/compressed weather service to market?
would €50K be enough to get the project off the ground? I'd suggest there's probably a big enough market to sell units in the €1K region and sell a weather subscription (€10-25 a month - sticking a finger in the air) thats been optimised to minimise bandwidth.
I'd be open to the consideration of partnering with others to seed such a project (subject to all the usual caveats).
The first thing is to wait for Achim's airborne tests of the Thuraya XT satphone and the wifi access point.
It apparently works OK on the ground, which is good news already because their "GMPRS" service (~50kbits/sec and US$5/MB) used to be very flakey.
The recently released ADL110 by Dr. Golze Engineering is the closest fit so far. It now has an EASA minor change so it's legal to install and connect to the GNS430/540.
Would much rather have a portable satellite internet wifi hotspot within the aircraft to utilise with iPad / laptop etc than an installed device with limited scope. Once the hardware and internet reliability is established, only problem to overcome is compiling an optimised weather service.
Would much rather have a portable satellite internet wifi hotspot within the aircraft to utilise with iPad / laptop etc than an installed device with limited scope.
That's what I think as well, the time of dedicated fixed install devices is over. However, there are still a lot of people that think otherwise
Once the hardware and internet reliability is established, only problem to overcome is compiling an optimised weather service.
I have developed exactly that for my own use (based on Peter's work). Unfortunately most weather sites do not allow extracting images/information so I am reluctant to make it publicly available. PM me if you're interested. I have a size optimized web service (supported as an offline app on iOS) which uses a server tier to collect all kinds of weather information from a dozen sources and transcodes the images to very small JPEGs.
That product is not TSOd (nor of course PMAd) so there is no way to install it in an N-reg. People have tried that with stuff like Dynon products and in almost all cases failed to get it past any FSDO.
It's funny that EASA is OK with it, because (don't shoot the messenger here; I am all in favour, and if I could I would design my own autopilot) this is a clear breach of ICAO certification regs for aircraft with an ICAO CofA. I suspect that somebody got hold of somebody inside EASA who didn't understand the regs.
One can play the same game with the FAA of course, and the choice of FSDO inspectors is far greater One man I know of even managed to install a different engine in a TB20 after his FSDO told him that he can install any engine that shares the same engine TC. I reckon you would need a DER 8110-3 package done to install this device legally.
I too agree a portable display device is much better, and if you can get wifi networking then you can do "anything" else too e.g. emails and all the rest if you are hard up enough to pay the cost of the data. In fact I would buy an Ipad3 just for that and leave it in the plane.
It's funny that EASA is OK with it
"Display" devices have always been OK with EASA with a minor mod, there is some specific rule. With an optocoupler in between, they were allowed to connect the SAT device to GNS430/530 to read position and flight plans.
In fact I would buy an Ipad3 just for that and leave it in the plane.
Hmm, leaving it somewhere kind of defeats the purpose of an iPad, doesn't it?
"Display" devices have always been OK with EASA with a minor mod
Sure; a Minor Mod is normal for stuff which doesn't "control" anything on the aircraft. It is the fact that the device is not certified which is the issue. For example you cannot permanently install a satellite phone. Iridium sell satphone kits which come with aviation approvals.
But if EASA allows this, great. Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Hmm, leaving it somewhere kind of defeats the purpose of an iPad, doesn't it?
I will quit at this point
I have very little use for an Ipad for travelling because it needs a backpack to carry around, so if I may need to do something serious I may as well carry a lightweight laptop running winXP and which runs absolutely everything. We already have an Ipad2 around the house, which makes a great media player/browser for kids. Actually doing anything serious on it is a torture The other day I took it on a 2-day trip on which I received an email with a 10MB .zip file containing loads of PDFs, and after tearing my hair out for half an hour trying to transfer the PDFs into Goodreader I gave up. It's a great device for specific jobs which it does well.
To discuss this very serious topic properly, there is the new "IT" forum section
Have a look at our SAT box design: AeroPlus Iridium Aviation SAT box
The design is fully our own including the PCB design. It incorporates a small Linux server onboard which is used to compress and decompress the short-burst-data (SBD) packages send over the Iridium network.
We already have our own weather service providing worldwide weather such as METAR,TAF, GFS related data and are adding now to this weather radar images (at first) which we will provide to the pilot in compressed format if he is in SATmode.
There are some initiatives from WAFC London to provide radar and significant weather overlays. Maybe we add this information later as we go.
The Rudics version provides a better data-line then the SBD Iridium chip. Thuraya is great but no worldwide coverage and we aim not only at the aviation market but also the boating/marine market.
Any tips of suggestions are welcome :-)
