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Are there any portable/uncertified weather hardware on the market?

A budget solution, such as a stormscope or weather radar you can attach for instance on the wing strut ?

Jonas

ESOW Västerås, Sweden

A budget solution, such as a stormscope or weather radar…

Even if that existed, would you really trust your life on it? I once flew right through a CB (not funny at all) because of a malfunctioning weather radar. It showed green where it should have displayed red… An expensive, certified unit, maintained by the book and everything. Yet even those are not 100% reliable.

The most “budget” solution I would consider is a displayless stormscope which connects to a Gamin GNS or a variety of multi-function displays. This should cost around 5000 Euros including installation. Anything cheaper than that and I would rather stay out of convective weather…

EDDS - Stuttgart

Well, the ADL120 costs € 1900 and you can buy trip kits for it, and i would say it can do 75 percent of what onboard radar can do – if your’re flying in an area that is covered.

In a different sense, nothing stops you getting a satellite phone, connecting it to some display device, and accessing a weather website which delivers radar images.

This slightly old writeup explains some of it. At the very cheapest, you can pick up a Thuraya 7100 phone on Ebay for about 300 quid, pop a prepaid SIM into it (say another 100 quid) and, via RS232/USB, connect it to a tablet (has to be a Windows one; IOS or Android can’t do internet access over a serial link… well almost not quite… another story). That’s what I have been doing for about 5 years and it works most of the time. But I have never used it for enroute weather avoidance; only tafs and metars for destination and alternates.

And for a great deal of flying where you try to avoid hazardous enroute wx to start with, the tafs and metars are priceless, and good enough. It’s a pity there isn’t some cheap satellite service for Europe which broadcasts tafs and metars continuously.

Soon I will be moving to the newer Thuraya XT satphone, kindly loaned to me by another pilot, with a WIFI adaptor, so I can connect pretty well any display device to it. Whether it will access any more useful data for enroute, remains to be seen.

One problem with internet radar images (e.g. meteox.com) is that they can be just low level weather e.g. ground to FL100, which is trivial to overfly when IFR (because CAS is not relevant then). So a radar image needs to be used together with the IR image which tells you how high the cloud tops are.

For more extreme work – avoiding TCUs and CBs while flying in IMC – one needs a really good solution and I suspect nothing short of onboard radar is really good enough, but the ADL120 (which like all commercial/professional products uses the more expensive but more reliable Iridium satphone network) should be a lot better than nothing.

A portable stormscope may be a challenge because of interference from the aircraft. It would probably be a bit like the now dead ZAON traffic product – great when it works…

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The satphone solution is so much slower than the ADL which downloads a complete set of images plus all METARS and TAFs you need in less than a minute.

A set of radar images ever 15 minutes should be enough for all but the most complicated weather situations. No?

Last Edited by Flyer59 at 15 Jun 16:14

The satphone solution is so much slower than the ADL which downloads a complete set of images plus all METARS and TAFs you need in less than a minute

I can get a meteox.com image (via a private site, with the adverts stripped off ) and all likely tafs and metars, inside the 60 seconds it takes me run up a $1 bill. That’s on the old and slow 9.6k baud dial-up service. On the Thuraya GPRS service, 50k data rate, $5/MB, it costs much less still.

But that is not comparing comparable products. The image(s) I get are not georeferenced to the aircraft.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Flyer59 wrote:

The satphone solution is so much slower than the ADL which downloads a complete set of images plus all METARS and TAFs you need in less than a minute.

There I have to disagree strongly. Iridium SBD (which ADL and others use) can only transfer a few bytes a minute whereas Thuraya can transfer hundreds of kilobits per second. You can view real images with it which you can’t do with SBD. Just yesterday I completed what looked to be a very difficult flight (frequent TS forecast) and I used a strike map and satellite IR in addition to weather radar from my own private web site which has more coverage than commercial solutions because I do not have to obtain redistributor agreements for the weather. BTW, I can use ADL as well via Thuraya because it can use the normal wifi of the iOS/Android device as an alternative to the ADL hardware.

A set of radar images ever 15 minutes should be enough for all but the most complicated weather situations. No?

Only to see larger areas of bad stuff and to avoid them by remaining VMC. That is what us hobby pilots tend to do. For the more serious aviation where cancel is only an option when the skies fall down, onboard radar allows them to navigate in IMC between CBs. For that, a 15 (or even 5) minute old image is not good enough.

The image(s) I get are not georeferenced to the aircraft.

Mine are, that’s just a bit of software development Although I have some work to do to fix non working image sources. That’s the downside of not subscribing to an API — you have to constantly adapt your stuff.

Last Edited by achimha at 15 Jun 16:54

Ok . . i experimented a bit with Thuraya, but didn’t find it very reliable, but i am no specialist. I think the big advantage of the ADL is that Sebastian’s system nicely downsizes or compresses the images. In the few weeks i had it, no download failed and i always got a new set of images, metars and tafs in less than a minute.

I have used the ADL in IMC – but because i never fly too close to thunderstorms i find it good enough for normal flights in IMC. I guess i wouldn’t actually do the flights for which a live radar would make a difference … so i guess i am fine with the ADL

@Jonas, I am going to raise the issue of getting an ADL device for our club now that we’re going to do EIR training.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

ADL120 is the way to go if you want a working, reliable, hassle free and relatively cheap weather solution.

We share a unit with a couple of pilots and the running cost is a couple of euros per month.
We use it as a fully portable and removable solution. It’s stored in the hangar in a locker when not used.

In difficult weather I might consume up to 10€ / hr for weather downloads but the peace of mind that comes with it is priceless.

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