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AviatorsBot - A Telegram Bot for Weather Updates and Calculations

Hello Boscomantico

thank you for the advice.

just a question :
I suppose in case of trip kit, if GOLZE Ing has our IBAN and our SEPA, we can decide just before each flight to use satellite data and dowloading…?

I think this system (ALD140 on iPad) could be useful, during IFR in IMC condition, as a strategy long distance to avoid towering-cumulus in IMC or no-embeded CB during IFR without Icing conditions.

I am flying for my own pleasure only and during Winter season most of IFR are NO GO in IMC in the range FL60 FL110 because possible icing (IMC) or only to cross layers ; and after cold front or sometimes during summer season (in the second part of the afternoon) NO GO is my choice if CB embeded somewhere …
So I expect this ADL 140 and trip kit for this kind fligth could be usefull because we know before each fligth the weather data (TAF TEMSI and front map, satellite) and the possible change of the initial FPL.

of course it could help to divert quickly before too badly weather conditions

the price in increasing security is quite cheap regardind the year dual subscription GTN650/GNS430 and the JEEP FD on the IPAD !

Adls
LFPU, France

ADLS wrote:

What is the higher altitude you get Metar/Taf Txt. with Telegram-aviatorsbot ?

Hi ADLS!

There won’t be any difference. Both depend on you having an internet connection.

I personally use both, I’ve developed AviatorsBot in addition to Autorouter since Autorouter has subscription features but they are just one small feature for it and the UI in the commands to be sent, etc. is a bit hard to use in my opinion. AviatorsBot is mostly focused on providing this feature and make it easy and painless to use.

You should never rely on having an internet connection from the current ground based 4G network in flight! It is more a nice to have feature, get a better grip of what the weather is doing etc. If you really need it ask ATC for it or get a more reliable means to acquire it!

Right now that’s only Satellite in Europe. Like the mentioned ADL140.

From what it looks like ADS-B weather is not going to happen in Europe. The next big change is going to be coming along with the roll out of 5G network upgrades across Europe, which I guess will include considerations for providing internet connectivity to airliners.

See for example this ICAO conference paper:
https://www.icao.int/Meetings/anconf13/Documents/WP/wp_244_en.pdf

From a technical perspective only the 4G network really supports our use case (hand over speed between neighboring cells) so I’ll do some flight tests where I force my handset to only use 4G and see if it changes anything.

Fly for your dreams
LOAV

I extremely doubt any system for airliners to get connected will be economic for GA.

It won’t be just antennae pointing upwards. There will be authentication also

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Yes that depends. There are already LTE networks for Air2Ground communications dedicated for airliners, which of course are not really available to us, as far as I know. But the ones I know of are being operated by dedicated providers, the story might change once the “regular” telco providers start to integrate these capabilities. Still wouldn’t mean that airliners can just buy a 20 Eur per month card and share it with the whole plane, thats more of a contract issue.

Whether they would really go down the route of either having a dedicated second RAN just for this case or figure that airlines won’t just breach the contract I can’t tell. What is a very important topic for telcos right now is IoT, Machine2Machine communications and such. UAVs are definitely a consideration see for example this demo flight of a drone using a demo 5G network:
https://www.telekom.com/en/media/media-information/archive/innsbruck-is-austria-s-first-5g-city-514808

And even although I work as contractor for a telco I’m not involved in networks engineering or 5G at all. So all of that is just wild speculation on my part with a tiny bit of knowledge strewn in ;-). As well as 5G not having that fixed of a meaning yet except the next big thing ;-)

What I can tell you is that we are note being completely forgotten for example the ETSI (european standardisation body) has a light aircraft scenario in a requirement study for the 5G new radio network:


Source
local copy

Also the IEEE and Nokia mention our use case if you search for it. What comes of it is pretty unclear and I’d say it also depends on what kind of beamforming capabilities will be integrated into the network, etc. But there is hope I’d say.

Fly for your dreams
LOAV

This is indeed interesting. Presumably all new phones will do 5G so no special equipment would be needed.

I have written this before… I still think that with aggressive 4G radio technology (possible only on a rooted phone, currently) one could get enough connectivity for tafs and metars to work well. The solution would involve being silent until a suitable network is heard (to prevent blacklisting a device seen by many towers) and then disappearing again if a signal is lost.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I don’t know if that is still an issue in a 4G network. 4G supports switching of cells in a very fast manner, according to a networks guy whom I talked to 3G would be pretty difficult even at our speeds. Might not apply to every network ;-)

From personal experience I can usually load our countries flight weather website with the actual radar composite in flight.

I’d say the best recipe for in flight data connection should be:

  • Select only the 4G network as preference on the phone (possible on stock Android without root)
  • Ensure that the phone supports all 4G/LTE bands used by the provider in the country and all countries that you plan to fly into
  • Get the phone with the highest SAR that you can find
  • Dual SIM with dual active 4G

The last one is still difficult a quick search turned up a specific Redmi which might support it. In general all phones which support dual VoLTE (voice over LTE) should be able to do it but might not actually have it implemented for vanilla data traffic.

I’d think that your modifications would actually require you to not only root the phone but actually change the base band firmware. I only know of one such phone ages ago which was capable of this. Usually this is of course strictly forbidden by the FCC and Co, which is the reason why those are usually quite well protected against modifications.

Fly for your dreams
LOAV

I’d think that your modifications would actually require you to not only root the phone but actually change the base band firmware. I only know of one such phone ages ago which was capable of this. Usually this is of course strictly forbidden by the FCC and Co, which is the reason why those are usually quite well protected against modifications.

The old Nokia phones used a dedicated CPU (masked ROM, as in all high volume apps) to manage the “telephony (GSM) stack”. The software in that was thoroughly QA verified. When Nokia went to Symbian, the purpose of that (well, one of many) was to do the whole lot in that OS, running on just the one CPU. And it worked. Interestingly but not surprisingly, when Nokia made Symbian open-source c. 2010, they left out the “telephony stack”, as well as the sources to all the apps. Nokia then quickly changed their mind on the open source policy but it was too late; the basic Symbian code was out in the wild.

I know only a little about this stuff but I don’t think you would need more than a root – because often you can do the job by turning off and on the “radio” in the phone. You can also do that on an unrooted phone by selecting and unselecting the Air mode, which forces a re-registration; this is usually required if you want mobile data after landing in France from a flight on which the phone was on, and for some combination of reasons, no doubt network dependent.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

How is this project coming along, @fabian?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

FYI, on 25 July 2020 at 05:44Z, I asked for ELLX weather, and still got the (stale) TAF of 242300Z along with the (fresh) METAR of 250520Z; Foreflight app a few seconds later gave me the 250500Z TAF.

ELLX

I suspect @Fabian is long gone… the Autorouter bot should work better because it has lots of users, although I don’t know how you get signed up.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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