Very good experience with Thuraya XT and the wifi hotspot. Provided the phone has a clear view to the satellite, reception is good and data transfer is fast. I had it turned on before takeoff and it was showing "Germany" for the whole trip until I turned it off over Croatia and restarted it to see if it could get its GPS position in flight. Well it did work, took about one minute and from then on it was saying "Croatia".
The wifi hotspot needs to be turned off and back on to reestablish a connection to the phone if you disconnect it. I did that to make sure there was no background data transfer eating up the credits on my prepaid card.
Internet felt very useable. I got all kinds of weather charts and did a bit of email -- all using the iPad. More testing to follow but that was very promising. For continued use, I would definitely want to have an external antenna and phone adapter.
An excellent report.
Thuraya's ~50k bits/sec ought to compare well with Iridium's 2.4k bits/sec.
With Iridium Rudics you can utilize up to 8 communication channels each10 kbits, so total would be 80kbits of data. The Thuraya's phone/wifi hotspot solution test results sound very good to me as well!
How do the data costs compare?
Last time I looked, Thuraya's "GPRS" was $5/MB.
This suggests it is N x 2.4kbits/sec, not N x 10kbits/sec.
Also it sounds like a dial-up call, not a per-kilobyte metered link like the Thuraya GPRS.
This suggests Rudics is 0.85/minute (USD presumably) which vaguely corresponds to pricing I had seen previously, so if they are charging N x 0.85, the costs are an order of magnitude more than Thuraya.
As you look at our design, our PCB design consists of 2 boards of which the top is the communications board. I just talked to our developers and they say it is quite easy to switch the COMS board to a Thuraya Module. So, it might very well be that we could offer a Thuraya alternative. I would have to investigate into this more deeper as I believe that the monthly data subscription price needs to be at a low price.
Basically all the rest of our design can stay the same. The SAT box creates a WIFI network in the aircraft and you can use your iPhone or iPad to connect to it and send/receive (weather)data.
Are you doing something in the way of a "firewall", to block access to sites such as microsoft.com, adobe.com, firefox.com, symantec.com, etc?
These "satphone to wifi" boxes have been around for quite some time (I posted some URLs here before, I think) for the sailing community. The problem is that as soon as you present a typical client device with an internet connection, it may start to download megabytes of app updates.
The existing products all claimed to have a facility for blocking a load of those URLs for exactly this reason.
It is possible to disable these but one needs to be seriously tech-savvy, especially as some (e.g. Java updates) hide the settings in hard to find places.
One 20MB auto update like that and with satcomms you could be in for $100, or much more, very easily. More to the point, your prepaid balance will be wiped out and the connection will be useless until you can land and do another topup. The biggest Thuraya topup I can do online is $160 and that would be wiped out in 2 hours if you don't catch it.
Thuraya doesn't offer a cheap embeddable modem from what I know. Iridium does a good job at that nowadays. I have created some prototype solution using a RockBLOCK Iridium modem and a Raspberry Pi with an external USB power pack.
However, if Thuraya proves to be reliable, I don't see much value in using Iridium for Europe/Africa/Asia. If a standard satphone with an accessory can do a wifi connection, there is no need for a separate device. The Thuraya XT + Thuraya XT hotspot costs around € 1000 today so a dedicated aircraft solution would have to compete with that.
Thuraya doesn't offer a cheap embeddable modem
In theory they do, or did - see bottom of here. I never managed to get a response from Thuraya on that product, however.
The Thuraya XT + Thuraya XT hotspot costs around € 1000 today so a dedicated aircraft solution would have to compete with that.
A fixed install will never be less than 10x that.
The challenge is to keep it all neat, while charging the phone from the aircraft, and not getting interference from the charging circuitry etc.
Eagerly awaiting the next status update from achimha on his adventures with the Thuraya XT & wifi :-)
Our SAT box incorporates a proxy-server so that it is quite easy to block massive downloads. Actually, when using the Short Burst Data Iridium chip, the internet connection only runs through our own sofware on the iPhone/ipad sending out small packages and receiving small amounts of data. It is just enough to get the enroute weather and communicate on position reports etc.
Consider that the new Cirrus Perspective Global Connect solution is an Iridium based solution, bringing you weather in the cockpit. We will bring the same kind of weather to GA pilots at a competitive price.
There is another solution available, which is the Inreach device from Delorme. It allows 2-way communication for exchanging text messages. An inbound e-mail address is not available nor an API, but I parse the e-mail you can send out for the ICAO code in the body of the e-mail message and the reply URL and send the latest METAR/TAF weather in a reply message. That way I can already get this weather easily in the cockpit while flying without spending too much on monthly subscriptions or heavy SAT phone charges.
