comanchepilot
En-Route
I bought Stratus 10 days ago. It arrived a week ago.
I have flown about 3 hours total with it. It seems to lose about 10% battery charge per hour flown here in SoCal.
On the ground at Brackett we are about 6nm from ONT. ONT has a ADS-B transmitter on site and I can not pick it up on the ground at POC however.
On a bad weather [for SoCal] day [last Friday - 2-3k OVC - BKN layers to 15000 a little bit of rain here and there] I took a hop from POC to CRQ and back for lunch. Once I was established on the departure from POC and had the airplane on the right radial headed for PRADO about 1600' in the soup I looked down and I had weather. I its picks it up pretty fast on the climbout. It displayed the local precip fairly well.
I had local METAR weather and 1m WAAS GPS resolution the entire flight. All the local airports had metars and my local radar was never more than 5 min old that I could see. There were no TFR's displayed however. I know the Disney one was right there. Stratus overlays the weather you receive when you get a briefing - so the TFR I received in the briefing was lost.
Today I flew a severe clear round robin leg. POC - F70 - VISTA - OCN - DANAH - JOGIT - POC.
Before I turned crosswind I had local weather from the ONT site - and it updated fairly regularly. The local radar was on a 5 min cycle [and there was nothing there today] but in a one hour flight the National Nexrad only updated once - when I scanned out to the entire nation there were only a few hits in the midwest near the lakes and there was nothing in the Seattle area even though I know it was raining there.
So the jury is out - it works ok locally - which is the only real reason why you need it. Not having the Disney TFR displayed when I flew within 5nm of it was a little disconcerting . . .
I'll post more as I fly more - I am buying a universal PDA mount for it and will mount on the window behind my head - then I can cut the wifi power back a little and save some battery life.
I will probably just keep it in the airplane and power it with a long cigar lighter extension under the seat so that it turns on when I turn on the master.
The only thing I miss about XM is the easy winds aloft forecast but I found that the XM winds were rarely accurate and often had a head wind when it was telling me to expect a TW.
I have flown about 3 hours total with it. It seems to lose about 10% battery charge per hour flown here in SoCal.
On the ground at Brackett we are about 6nm from ONT. ONT has a ADS-B transmitter on site and I can not pick it up on the ground at POC however.
On a bad weather [for SoCal] day [last Friday - 2-3k OVC - BKN layers to 15000 a little bit of rain here and there] I took a hop from POC to CRQ and back for lunch. Once I was established on the departure from POC and had the airplane on the right radial headed for PRADO about 1600' in the soup I looked down and I had weather. I its picks it up pretty fast on the climbout. It displayed the local precip fairly well.
I had local METAR weather and 1m WAAS GPS resolution the entire flight. All the local airports had metars and my local radar was never more than 5 min old that I could see. There were no TFR's displayed however. I know the Disney one was right there. Stratus overlays the weather you receive when you get a briefing - so the TFR I received in the briefing was lost.
Today I flew a severe clear round robin leg. POC - F70 - VISTA - OCN - DANAH - JOGIT - POC.
Before I turned crosswind I had local weather from the ONT site - and it updated fairly regularly. The local radar was on a 5 min cycle [and there was nothing there today] but in a one hour flight the National Nexrad only updated once - when I scanned out to the entire nation there were only a few hits in the midwest near the lakes and there was nothing in the Seattle area even though I know it was raining there.
So the jury is out - it works ok locally - which is the only real reason why you need it. Not having the Disney TFR displayed when I flew within 5nm of it was a little disconcerting . . .
I'll post more as I fly more - I am buying a universal PDA mount for it and will mount on the window behind my head - then I can cut the wifi power back a little and save some battery life.
I will probably just keep it in the airplane and power it with a long cigar lighter extension under the seat so that it turns on when I turn on the master.
The only thing I miss about XM is the easy winds aloft forecast but I found that the XM winds were rarely accurate and often had a head wind when it was telling me to expect a TW.
