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In flight radar covering eastern Europe?

Im hoping for a bit of input regarding in cockpit weather for flying in eastern part of Europe. On my typical mission I fly my TB21 around 3-5 hours from Denmark and to eastern part of Europe. That means flying IFR over Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia ect.. The TB21 is a great performer (in piston world at least). With the turbo Im almost always able to find an altitude above icing level enroute (ceeling is FL250). Even in summer these usually don’t go much higher than FL200. What I find as the main issue on these trips is lack of inflight weather information. My main concerns are thunderstorms. Im generally conservative and scrap a flight if EMBD CB is forecast along the route on SIGWX or CB activity at departure or destination area. I have a WX500 stormscope displayed on a GTN750 which is a lot better than nothing. But what I really lack is a radar picture and nice to have also cloud tops and METAR/TAFs. Before anybody says GARMIN GSR56 or ADL140 I can say I already investigated and both unfortunately don’t have any radar picture of eastern Europe. Same goes for Garmin Pilot app. I queried Garmin if they had plans to include east which they replied they did not. Most likely has to do with price for getting the data vs number of users willing to pay. Unfortunately we are way behind the US on this in Europe with no NEXRAD service or anything like that, data is most likely only possible via a satellite phone and data transferred somehow to an ipad.. 3G/4G is not available above a few thousand feet. I can confirm this from many trips and tries. You might get an occasional connection near mountains but useless for anything serious. The weather service that is provided for free to pilots in scandinavia has radar of Europe including eastern part (data coming from eurmetnet.eu). But its packed on a website which surely never was designed with small bandwidth in mind. So to boil my questions down:

What weather services exist that provides radar/weather data for all of Europe (reliable and up-to-date enough for aviation usage) and works on slow satellite connections too?

What satellite providers, phones and antennas works for the actual data transfer? And how is the data shared with an ipad fx?

And how about blocking other apps stealing the connection? Anytime my iphone sees an wifi connection 50 different apps including the OS itself starts transferring data and a slow connection will quickly become useless.

THY
EKRK, Denmark

Still I would not exclude the ADL as it gives you strike and IR data. While the strike might be a few minutes old the geo referencing is more accurate than the stormscope. The color coding of the IR picture gives you an admittedly coarse cloud top indication but to make it simple where you see blue or light blue and strikes avoid no matter whether it would show yellow orange or red precipitation.

I wonder if Sebastian could make the IR with its cloud tops with a finer resolution.

LSZH

I am really surprised the ADL doesn’t do Eastern Europe given that Meteox.com does:

Of course Meteox doesn’t give you a georeferenced image.

And how about blocking other apps stealing the connection? Anytime my iphone sees an wifi connection 50 different apps including the OS itself starts transferring data and a slow connection will quickly become useless.

Yes this is the big problem with satellite phones if the phone does a generic internet connection (the ADL product connects to a private server of theirs, only) and you use wifi to connect to a tablet. All the apps see the “network connection” and go crazy… you have to firewall it. Some past threads e.g. here and another linked from that one. I had the same problem even without wifi, with the Thuraya phone.

My current stuff is described here (near the end) but I was going to get the ADL at some point.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Outside of Europe I used IridiumGo! with AeroPlus App in sat mode to see IR and Strike. It was very slow and often lost connection. I understand ADL does the same.

LPFR, Poland

Current ADL coverage:

I don’t see any evidence that the Meteox image has a larger coverage area. Also you can’t know how much of that Meteox image is real radar returns and what is extrapolation / forecast.

Looks like Croatia is the only obvious difference.

I think the basic Meteox image is all real. Their actual website offers a projection which is obviously potentially bogus.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The radar coverage of the ADL is of the western third of Poland only. I missed the rest dearly when crossing Poland recently. The topic has been discussed with Sebastian many times. Obviously, if there were a decent solution for Poland and other parts of eastern Europe, then he would provide it.

But yes, the ADL will still give you METARs, TAFs, winds aloft, temperatures aloft etc., and most importantly: sferics even in areas where there is no rainfall radar data available.

So @THY, your problem doesn’t hang on hardware or software you are using, it hangs on the lack of decent data provision by the weather services of certain countries. I am afraid there is no real solution presently for aircraft that can’t have airborne weather radar (and even that has certain shortcomings over downloaded radar images).

Last Edited by boscomantico at 09 Aug 07:01
Mainz (EDFZ) & Egelsbach (EDFE), Germany

There is some radar data for Poland and other Eastern Europe countries online

http://www.pogodynka.pl/polska/radary Poland
http://www.radareu.cz even has Belarus

If only there was an app to download that over Iridium..

LPFR, Poland

@loco: the rain radar in the AeroPlus Weather app does provide rain radar and lightning strike coverage for Poland and the Czech Republic.

EDLE, Netherlands

Peter what leads you to think that meteox.com has radar of eastern europe? The picture you posted more or less only covers western europe plus a small bit of east. What I dont like about that kind of radar image is that feedback about radar covarage is missing. Garmin pilot had the same thing in the earlier releases and I gave them feedback on this issue. It has since been changed so the non-covered areas are colored darker. The ADL picture at least gives no doubt about what area it actually covers.

THY
EKRK, Denmark
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