iPad / GPS question

BrianNC

BrianNC

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I don't really pay attention to the iPad threads since I don't have one, but it looks like I'm getting one.

One simple question: If I get the iPad with cellular, I understand that model comes with the built in GPS. If I get that model, is there ever a need to buy an external GPS or is the built in one sufficient for all GPS needs?

Any other suggestions or advice about purchase would also be appreciated.
 
The iPad with cellular have the GPS reciever. The wifi only models do not have GPS.

I've used my iPad Gen1 with and without external GPS with no problems while flying. I have a BadElf GPS unit but have not seen the need to always use it. I'm concerned that plugged into the iPad things could get damaged.

Others have used that bright orange puck, don't remember the name, they connect via Bluetooth.
 
I haven't started training yet, but my recent iPad purchase was partially justified by my intention to use it as an electronic flight bag for charts, backup situational awareness, etc. I've also read a lot of online articles and blogs about the iPad's usefulness in the cockpit.

The best article I've found so far is Greg Brown's Flying Carpet blog: http://gregbrownflyingcarpet.com/2010/10/14/ipad-for-aviators-yes-the-3g-model-offers-gps-and-no-you-dont-need-a-data-plan-to-navigate-aloft/ He has several links in that article to other sources of information. There is a NASA ASRS report that describes inaccurate GPS fixes when using the internal iPad GPS: http://www.nafinet.org/APPLE_IPAD_USED_AS_AN_EFB.pdf

Sportys also has a good bit of information about using the iPad in flight on their iPad Pilot News site: http://ipadpilotnews.com/

The wireless-only version of the iPad doesn't have a GPS built in. You will need one of the 3G/4G models for that. But even if you get a unit with a built in GPS, I would hesitate to rely on it for location data. It wasn't made with aviation in mind, and there are many reports about inaccuracy and gps services not working correctly while using the iPad's internal GPS.

The take-away for me:

- I won't be using iPad's GPS-enabled apps (like ForeFlight) without an external device. External GPS units can be purchased for between $100-$130 (google Bad Elf or Dual Electronics).

- If you are wanting access to more than just GPS location data (Weather, NEXRAD radar, METARs, TAFs, PIREPs, TFRs, etc.) you will need an ADS-B unit (no subscription needed). They will run you up to $799 for a Stratus unit. SkyRadar sells three units ranging in price from $599-$799 (I haven't read much about the SkyRadar unit, so have no opinion on how good/bad they are). These units will provide you all the data that you get via ADS-B, plus the GPS location data. ADS-B transmitters are all ground-based as far as I can tell, so the receivers work best the higher you go. You may or may not have access to the full flow of information while you are on the ground, and different ground transmitters send out different types of information (see this link for more details: http://ipadpilotnews.com/2012/05/flying-with-stratus-a-practical-perspective/)

There is another, more expensive route, providing XM Satellite access to weather and other data. XM external units sell for quite a bit more than the Stratus ($1000 or so the last time I checked), and also require a subscription service. They don't provide access to the same set of data that the ADS-B units provide (for example, Pireps). Due to the higher price and added cost of the subscription service, I haven't looked into them as an option for me.
 
I'm using an Ipad 2 with the internal GPS. No issues whatsoever. Works great. I don't have a data plan activated for it (nor do I plan to), so I just pull out the Iphone if I need quick WX updates.
 
I have an IPad2 wifi+3G and I use Foreflight on it. I don't use an external GPS receiver and have NEVER lost GPS fix with it. I have read other people telling about losing GPS fix and then spent the $100 for a Bad Elf receiver.

From what I can tell, the reliability of the internal GPS antenna will be determined by your location, but that's even hard to believe, given the number of satellites it connects to.

BTW, I have never gotten a 3G plan for my IPad. I simply get the latest weather at the airport and go fly. I fly into some of the most abandoned, deserted, little small town airports you can imagine and all of them seem to have Wifi.

I would suggest that you try the internal GPS receiver first, and if it gives any trouble, get a Bad Elf receiver, or if you start flying longer distances with it, spend another $800 and get the Stratus to go with Foreflight. The one time purchase gets you a WAAS GPS receiver that ALSO give in flight weather with no monthly subscription.

Hope this helps
 
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It does look like that one could save $29 by getting the wifi only with external GPS since the cellular 16GB is $129 more than the wifi only.
 
BrianNC said:
It does look like that one could save $29 by getting the wifi only with external GPS since the cellular 16GB is $129 more than the wifi only.
Click to expand...

That's true but it is a real hastle having to keep up with an extra device and keep it charged too. I started out long ago with a wi-fi only iPad 1 and GNS 5870 GPS receiver. I then transitioned to an iPad 2 with the internal GPS. It is the way to go, plus you have the 3g/4g option for internet if you decide you want to activate it. I would not even think twice about the extra $30. Some have said the external GPS' are more accurate and better than the internal one. I personally have not been able to tell a difference between the two.

http://sagetechcorp.com/

The only way I would recomend an external device would be if you were getting something like the Sagetech Clarity with ADS-B, AHRS and GPS all-in-one combo. That's the direction I'm headed when they become available to drive my WingX Synth Vision and have weather plus traffic.
 
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BrianNC said:
One simple question: If I get the iPad with cellular, I understand that model comes with the built in GPS. If I get that model, is there ever a need to buy an external GPS or is the built in one sufficient for all GPS needs?
Click to expand...
Only place mine hasn't worked is in the back of an airliner completely surrounded by alumiinum.
 
My 3G with no cellular plan works OK without the external. Doesn't work at all in an airliner, the Aera I had worked like a champ in the airliner. I bought the iPad 8 months ago, have probably turned it on in flight for 30 minutes all total. It's just too big and clumsy to put anywhere in a Cherokee and the display is unreadable in any sort of sunlight, even with the glare screen protector. The GPS in the iPad is sub-par aviation quality. Had I to do it over again I would.

Get a Droid or iPhone.
Jailbreak it.
Install PDANet or similar for cellular internet.
Buy a wifi only iPad
Buy the wireless blutooth GPS receiver.

or, even better if my sole purpose was aviation...

Buy another Aera.
 
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bartmc said:
Doesn't work at all in an airliner,
Click to expand...
That has not been the case for me. I always sit in a window seat. I put my iPad on the fold down seat back tray and follow my route along my commercial flights. I have many screen captures at 40,000 ft and 450 knots to prove it.
It's just too big and clumsy to put anywhere in a Cherokee and the display is unreadable in any sort of sunlight, The GPS in the iPad is sub-par aviation quality.Aera.
Click to expand...
This also has not been the case for me. I have mine mounted on a Ram yoke mount in portrait orientation down over my yoke. I just haven't had any negative issues with the internal GPS in my iPad. I will agree the visibility leaves something to be desired if the sun is shinning straight in on the iPad through the pilot side window. I'm sure the smaller Aera screen would be more vivid. All-in-all I still like flyng with my iPad running WingX with Synth Vision.
 
In reading the last few posts, it occurred to me that MAYBE I've had good luck with my internal GPS receiver because mine is an IPad2. I wonder now if the complaints I've read about the internal receiver were by people with an original IPad instead? I wasn't paying attention to that when I read them.
 
MBDiagMan said:
In reading the last few posts, it occurred to me that MAYBE I've had good luck with my internal GPS receiver because mine is an IPad2. I wonder now if the complaints I've read about the internal receiver were by people with an original IPad instead? I wasn't paying attention to that when I read them.
Click to expand...
Mine is an iPad 1, and I've had no problems other than, as I said above, in the back of an airliner.
 
Garmin just announced a Bluetooth GPS for the IPAD and Android tablets.
They are advertising 12 hr battery life. A $99 individual unit and a $129
package deal.

http://garmin.blogs.com/my_weblog/mobile/


I would really like to see and ADS-B receiver form them with built in GPS.
But we still have some time before Oshkosk.
 
I have I-pad3 with 3G/GPS. In 68.5 hrs of flying I have lost gps reception maybe 3 times for very short time. In an RV-10 on a sunny day with sunglasses on the screen is marginal. I have anti-glare screen installed. Foreflight is great below 3000' agl. The gps/sectional accuracy is off by 200-300' at various times. The gps/geo ref taxi diagrams are very accurate and handy at B, C & D's. Battery lasts a good 6-7 hrs while continuously on. The 3G reception is not as good as my I-Phone. Both have to be rebooted occasionally. Are they worth $700-750...Yes!
 
Below 3000' AGL? Which are you saying, that you never go higher or that you've had problems higher?

I've not had any altitude related problems with mine. The iPad 3 has been to 11,000 over 3000' MSL terrain.

The iPad 1 was above 13,000 MSL. (But that was about 500' AGL crossing the pass. Grin...)

Both have had very intermittent GPS signal loss from time to time using the internal GPS. Most likely culprit is just GPS satellite geometry and a wing/roof in the way.

Never had more than a brief outage, and for a device not designed for anything other than situational awareness, that's fine by me.

A Garmin device with a remote antenna thats amplified, probably has an advantage for maintaining a signal, but offers no more in terms of legality of use... They're both not intended as primary navigation sources nor certified for such.

Works for me.
 
FYI... restarting the iPad (or at least killing all running apps), before flight, seems to help a lot. I regularly see friends 'pads trying to run moving map software, with a couple of dozen of apps running in the background. 'asking for trouble.
 
CT4ME said:
FYI... restarting the iPad (or at least killing all running apps), before flight, seems to help a lot. I regularly see friends 'pads trying to run moving map software, with a couple of dozen of apps running in the background. 'asking for trouble.
Click to expand...

Heh. In another thread, Kent says they're not really running. I disagreed in that if they can wake up or be woken up by things, that's nothing different than a terminate-and-stay-ready in other OS's, and it's just semantics how the OS wants to display that to the end user and also to the developer.

Somewhere down deep, the interrupt triggers, and the code runs on the processor, in either paradigm. Call it "sleep"' call it "stopped but can be awakened by a self timer or the OS if certain criteria are met", call it a "running program with nothing to do until certain input criteria are met either internally or from an OS API that triggers it"' doesn't really matter in a multi-tasking OS. It's just different names for "can start up instantly at any time". There are only a certain number of cores on the CPU and there's always contention for them in any modern OS that's not an RTOS where CPU and/or Core Affinity actually means something... As in, the OS can lock everything else off of that hardware if a particular chunk of code is running inside a high-priority, mandatory, loop.

So I kill them. And my personal experience has indicated that things are generally more stable if all background Apps are manually killed prior to flight.

YMMV.

The new NOAA alert App I have doesn't even have to be launched. It's always running and NOT visible in the running App bottom icon menu. It's a nifty trick.
 
dmlad4uu said:
I would really like to see and ADS-B receiver form them with built in GPS.
But we still have some time before Oshkosk.
Click to expand...

Not Garmin, but STRATUS, ADS-B receiver with GPS, for use with ForeFlight on IPad.
 
RV10flyer said:
I have I-pad3 with 3G/GPS. In 68.5 hrs of flying I have lost gps reception maybe 3 times for very short time. In an RV-10 on a sunny day with sunglasses on the screen is marginal. I have anti-glare screen installed. Foreflight is great below 3000' agl. The gps/sectional accuracy is off by 200-300' at various times. The gps/geo ref taxi diagrams are very accurate and handy at B, C & D's. Battery lasts a good 6-7 hrs while continuously on. The 3G reception is not as good as my I-Phone. Both have to be rebooted occasionally. Are they worth $700-750...Yes!
Click to expand...

I've flown at 12,500 MSL in the middle of nowhere and not lost GPSwith Foreflight, being above or below 3,000ft should make no difference on GPS reception.

Turn off wifi and 3G while flying, the battery will last longer.
 
denverpilot said:
Heh. In another thread, Kent says they're not really running. I disagreed in that if they can wake up or be woken up by things, that's nothing different than a terminate-and-stay-ready in other OS's, and it's just semantics how the OS wants to display that to the end user and also to the developer.

Somewhere down deep, the interrupt triggers, and the code runs on the processor, in either paradigm. Call it "sleep"' call it "stopped but can be awakened by a self timer or the OS if certain criteria are met", call it a "running program with nothing to do until certain input criteria are met either internally or from an OS API that triggers it"' doesn't really matter in a multi-tasking OS. It's just different names for "can start up instantly at any time". There are only a certain number of cores on the CPU and there's always contention for them in any modern OS that's not an RTOS where CPU and/or Core Affinity actually means something... As in, the OS can lock everything else off of that hardware if a particular chunk of code is running inside a high-priority, mandatory, loop.

So I kill them. And my personal experience has indicated that things are generally more stable if all background Apps are manually killed prior to flight.

YMMV.

The new NOAA alert App I have doesn't even have to be launched. It's always running and NOT visible in the running App bottom icon menu. It's a nifty trick.
Click to expand...

If they show in the bottom window when you (I) double click the button, they are running in background. Turn them off to extend battery life. Also turn off wifi and 3G unless you are running STRATUS. STRATUS connects via wifi, turn off 3G.
 
I use the iPad3 every time I fly and I never use it without my bad elf gps. I found at alt. over 3000 I'd lose signal so I always use the elf.
 
Internal GPS success depends on the airplane and how you use the iPad. Works well in the Citabria, even on my lap. Works almost never in the Waco on my lap (only place I can use it). So I use the little miserable 5--- something or other that connects by Blue Tooth but really is miserable to turn off. If you buy external get wireless, but make sure it has a real on off switch.

And the iPad is really too big to strap on, it conflicts with the stick, (both airplanes) so I leave it loose so I can put it down on T/O and lndng.

Ernie
 
denverpilot said:
Heh. In another thread, Kent says they're not really running. I disagreed in that if they can wake up or be woken up by things, that's nothing different than a terminate-and-stay-ready in other OS's, and it's just semantics how the OS wants to display that to the end user and also to the developer.

So I kill them. And my personal experience has indicated that things are generally more stable if all background Apps are manually killed prior to flight.

YMMV.
Click to expand...
I totally agree with you. I've had people strongly disagree and post links about how the apps sleep. Even in these links it would always say there are some processes that can continue to run. I know this is the case. I can load a flight plan in WingX and start the simulator followed by hitting the button on the face of the iPad to 'hide' the program. Wait two minutes and open WingX back up and the simulator will have progressed two minutes worth. If I hit the button to hide WingX followed by two taps to open the running apps tray and 'close' WingX from the app tray, when you then reopen WingX the program opens back up to the home menu screen and the simulator is not running. When I suggest that people close all apps from the running apps tray before using ForeFlight or WingX to get improved GPS performance, I usually get scoffed at by the self proclaimed iPad experts. I don't have issues with my internal GPS while others are complaining. WingX and ForeFlight both use a lot of iPad resources. It only makes sense to me to close down the apps in standby to allow these programs full use of your resources. Everyone is welcome to do as they wish with their iPads but everytime I fly I close all of the apps in standby from my app tray. Once I started doing this my GPS issues went away.
 
I've never had need for an external gps for my ipad1 going from texas to oshkosh to florida to new mexico. That was in a '75 Arrow with the ipad on my lap.

:)
 
You might as well get the Blue Tooth GPS receiver with the ADSB-in so get weather as well. I got the DUAL GPS as it's BT and sits out in a good view of the contellation.
 
Henning said:
You might as well get the Blue Tooth GPS receiver with the ADSB-in so get weather as well. I got the DUAL GPS as it's BT and sits out in a good view of the contellation.
Click to expand...

Not ready for prime time in the FAA Rocky Mountain Region yet, but we're all glad Clark bough one so he can tell us when the system starts to be somewhat usable here. (Which in my experience is always significantly before FAA will get around to announcing the system fully operational because there's always dead spots in any wireless design until all stations are active and any areas with multipath or other technical issues are ironed out and the overall project is deemed audited, tested and "meets design specifications".

As Clark noted on his trip south, he believes he was receiving an operational transmitter near Trinidad once he was over the Colorado Springs area, but data was somewhat spotty until further south.

I'm waiting for him to say he's getting some sort of reliable data near the Denver Metro area, before purchasing.

A side benefit will probably be that the first generation Stratus receivers are also significantly likely to have at least one or two highly annoying software/firmware bugs that hopefully they've designed a way to upload new firmware into their hardware.

Less likely but always a threat to any small electronics shop is that there will be an un-discovered hardware bug in actual hard-burned chipsets from upstream manufacturers that don't meet their data sheets or behave funny in ways that are undefined.

There's a reason the wisdom in consumer electronics and software is "never buy version 1 of anything unless you're getting enough value to overcome the pain".
 
Well, the unit that's been out for WingX has been out for around a year, I still prefer WingX to FF.
 
With this hot (100 F+) weather we've been having, I have been having some overtemp issues with my Ipad, with it sitting in my lap in the sunlight. I've had to put it on the passenger's side floor to keep it out of the sun and cool enough to operate.
 
RAM mount on the yoke.

Fixes the sun angle and heat problems and works great except in turbulence when the yoke is twitching back and forth to keep level and you're trying to use the touchscreen at the same time. ;)
 
I don't like yoke mounts myself. I use a suction cup mount over in the corner of the windshield that lets me get it right down into an unobtrusive corner.
 
Henning said:
I don't like yoke mounts myself. I use a suction cup mount over in the corner of the windshield that lets me get it right down into an unobtrusive corner.
Click to expand...

Have one of those also. iPad is a touch big for it, but it can be wedged in the 182 corner, barely.

You'd have more room in the 310 probably.
 
denverpilot said:
Have one of those also. iPad is a touch big for it, but it can be wedged in the 182 corner, barely.

You'd have more room in the 310 probably.
Click to expand...

Amazing how much difference in room 9 inches of extra cabin width makes...;)
 
I have the IPAD 1 3G and the Bad Elf. I have pretty much given up even bothering with the Bad Elf. Works the same with or without.

If you have 3G don't bother with the external GPS.

I run the AERA and the Ipad. Can't imagine why anyone would need anything else. (except of course /G) GPS approaches.
 
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