I am looking for the most compact way of doing this
The phone is a cheap £300 Thuraya satellite phone, with an RS232 interface. There are USB-232 cables, such as the one in the above pic.
The browser can be quite primitive - it will be going only to one website, displaying simple data.
I think one of the old Pocket/PC PDAs would do it. Some of them (the Ipaq?) did have RS232 adapters.
The gotcha is that the device needs to do Dial Up Networking (DUN) which rules out all IOS and Android stuff. Basically you need something that runs some version of Windows. But I don't know if Pocket/PC ever supported DUN.
Hi!
I can't imagine anything smaller than a Psion Series 5 to be useful for your purpose. There is an RS232 cable for it and it has an internet browser (or whatever they called this back in the year 2000). There used to be web browsers for some PDAs from Palm as well (RS232 was standard then) but I seriously doubt they can display even the most primitive current website.
Android devices can do it. I just ordered the new Nexus 7 which should be a great platform.
See my later edits. It needs to do DUN. IOS or Android are no good.
I visited this in the past, thinking that perhaps somebody may have done it for Symbian. No luck. It was done for bluetooth, but the only Thuraya phone which might support that is the XT.
There are PPP clients for Android. This will work for sure.
A smarter way would be a wifi hotspot that does the PPP and provides a network. There are battery powered small form factor wifi routers running DD-WRT that can do it.
Obviously it "can be done" with some hardware and some software 
The question is whether that PPP app will dial up 1722 and then run TCP/IP. I wonder if anybody wants to try it. I have a couple of spare phones, and one SIM. I don't have any Android devices currently.
Sure, I can give it a try. It will work, it's just a COM port and a Hayes AT dialup. My Thuraya phone works the same way, I just dial another number for GmPRS which is much faster (and thus cheaper). The slow dialup should work, too although I've never tried it.
That will be great - thanks.
I recall going up the "XT" road before and found some other problem. I recall it didn't have RS232, so DUN over BT was the only way.
Can it power up with BT enabled, so no fiddling in Settings is needed?
As you can tell I am looking at sorting out a totally dedicated and compact way of getting tafs and metars.
The XT has a USB port which is just a RS232 USB controller recognized by all systems. The XT does not have Bluetooth, at least not my version (I recall there was a more expensive version which also has GSM). I operate it with a small wifi router, Bluetooth on iOS is very restricted.
As you can tell I am looking at sorting out a totally dedicated and compact way of getting tafs and metars.
Why dedicated? Isn't the beauty that everything works together nowadays? An Android/iOS tablet is the opposite of a dedicated device. If you want something dedicated and highly reliable, best get the ADL from Sebastian Golze.
The XT USB port is surely a USB Slave, not a Controller?
