Peter wrote:
The old Avidyne MLX770 and Garmin GSR56 cost best part of $100/month (very few people were happy to talk about how much they pay)
The price of Garmin’s satellite service is public:
“Best part of $100/month” is true.
Peter wrote:
Golze ADL is about €25/month
I don’t match that price on the website: https://www.ing-golze.de/service.jsp
€25.00 on my statement.
Is there some info on Starlink’s lower speed options?
It would be nice to have “proper internet”, even at GPRS rates. This is why I spent so much time on Thuraya, only to conclude the obvious which is that the product is unreliable and the customer service is even worse. A service which fails to deliver the metars say 10% of the time is basically useless for flying, but ADL never fails.
However “internet” nowadays doesn’t really function at GPRS rates. Most web server connections time out unless the bandwidth is in the region of 100kbps. At lower speeds e.g. 20kbps of old GPRS, you can get POP3 emails, and messaging services like telegram work on GPRS (whatsapp is more flakey).
lionel wrote:
“Best part of $100/month” is true.
I would assume that for most people who have a GSR56 installed that translates into “less than 20% of one flight hour”.
So doesn’t really matter…
I currently have Gogo ATG on the plane. It uses Inmarsat and is fast compared to Iridium. A few hundred kilobits I guess. The price however… $8/MB. One background software update and…
Can’t wait for Starlink to give them a run for their money.
Peter wrote:
One cannot get the required signal to noise ratio with a small antenna.
You certainly can. The antenna elements are small already. We are talking about a massive array here. You can use fewer elements and reduce the data rate.
The product is still in beta. I assume there will be software upgrades to the sats for other applications as well, e.g., lower data rates.
that translates into “less than 20% of one flight hour”.
I would agree if you fly “heavy IFR” the whole time, but few in GA do, and IMHO not many want to pay $100/m for wx delivery. Anyway, I think no matter how one shakes this, the market has spoken already. Of the many pilots I know of, only one had the MLX770 (and he no longer flies) and nobody I know directly has the GSR56. Also, I vaguely recall reading that Garmin have reduced some functionality (voice calls?). In our main thread on the GSR56 I count around 2-3 people who actually say they have it.
I assume there will be software upgrades to the sats for other applications as well, e.g., lower data rates.
I thought there already were… so this seems hypothetical. Yes of course you can if you drop the bitrate – as per previous posts.
Dimme wrote:
The antenna elements are small already
Antenna elements will be sized according to the frequency of the signal, which is quite high, so the elements will be small. The problem is you need antenna gain to make it work, traditionally you’d use a dish (the antenna element is still small – the element is not the dish but the thing on pole the dish is focused on). I understand they are doing this by beamforming which gets rid of a requirement for an ungainly dish, but it’s not going to fit in a phone, although from the pictures I’ve seen, it might be usable on a small boat.
Peter wrote:
Also, I vaguely recall reading that Garmin have reduced some functionality (voice calls?).
Honestly: I don’t know if voice still works (or if it ever did) – for me there simply is no use case for this. There’s nothing I want to do out of the plane that can’t be done (even better) with text…
For those who actually think about installing a 20k sat solution in their plane, there is one thing much more important than some k installation cost or a couple of 10EUR monthly fee: Long term availability.
What broke Avidynes neck in this market was not the technical solution or cost, but that too many people in the target group did not have the trust that if they drilled holes in their hull to install it they got something that they can still use in 10 years. Therefore if they installed such a solution they were happy to pay the Garmin price premium for more confidence in longer term availability.
Malibuflyer wrote:
I vaguely recall reading that Garmin have reduced some functionality (voice calls?).
Voice still works on the GSR56
Malibuflyer wrote:
I would assume that for most people who have a GSR56 installed that translates into “less than 20% of one flight hour”.
So doesn’t really matter…
That is not how most of them think. The crucial point is that it must be an appropriate price for the service they are getting. Even if you pull up in a Citation you don’t want to be charged 50 Euro for the pizza at the airport restaurant ;-) Garmin tried a few years ago much higher prices for the GSR56 service which went up even further when installed on turbine and jet planes. But then they reduced it to the current level of about 80 USD plus VAT for most cases.
I am not sure we can establish why Avidyne failed. They were first in the market. Sure their box wasn’t cheap – about 10k, plus some certification related extras no doubt. There is a lot of support work behind it because you have to run a wx server. These products don’t use the normal internet (like you might do on a $500k Inmarsat installation); they package the data and send it via a load of UDP packets (or via some other short packet service) because if some are lost it doesn’t matter (to a wx image, and metars can be sent several times over). And we all know the story of getting European wx. Look at the struggles which Foreflight have in supporting a European product with notams etc etc… I would be amazed if Avidyne sold more than a few dozen in Europe. And they always struggled in the engineering resources department. Look at the endless stream of product announcements they post, of which most never appear (like the plug-compatible King replacement servos for their AP). They are focusing on the stuff which moves: IFDs, TAS, and probably supporting a load of legacy products with servicing and the ever-lucrative databases.
I bet you that the Starlink product, if it ever materialises in a GA-usable form, will also be using some low speed service, with no viable internet access. It’s obvious from their promo that for “broadband” it needs a decent big antenna (a home sat sized dish, or one of the setup you can put in a King Air etc) and since the “internet” is not usable at GPRS speeds (say, 1/10 of slow broadband) there won’t be any market below broadband speeds, so they are likely to do exactly what Iridium did which is a cheap small slow packet service. It’s like SMS on GSM – the telcos did it as a “goodie” on the back of their existing traffic, never realising it would eventually raise so many billions. But this will never raise that money because there are no client devices, although they will no doubt find markets in telemetry, if they can do something really cheap. Their competitor is the $3/month data-only SIM cards. A lot of cheap telemetry is dial-up over GSM. That leaves only markets where there is no GSM coverage i.e. most of the countryside, for stuff like water company telemetry.
