Chinese GPS Units will work
Having watched and provided a little input to the development of Tim Dawson's Sky Demon on this forum, I purchased the "In Flight" software when it came out. It is very good indeed and continues to get better as Tim supports the package with excellent regular updates.
I started to look into a GPS touchscreen device to run the software and as a start, and for experimentation purposes I bought a 5" Chinese touchscreen navigator from Ebay for £46 plus a few quid for delivery. The unit arrived and was preloaded with IGO8, a road navigation program which is actually not bad, but to get the Sky Demon onto it, took me a while due to the minute manual being all in Chinese! However, the unit was using the WIN CE operating system which is compatible with Sky Demon and what I did was this:-
I copied the existing IGO8 software from the provided SD card onto another card, basically backing it up. Then I transferred the Sky Demon software onto this backup in place of the IGO8 files and ran it.
It didn't work Why? Because the GPS had been set up to "look for" IGO8. So I simply renamed the Sky Demon folder "IGO8" and made sure that I did the same for the Sky Demon executable file (.exe) and ran it. Sure enough it fired up a treat
The last thing to do is make sure you have a GPS signal working. If not, go into the options menu on Sky Demon Flight and change the “Com port” to a different number. I found it worked when using Com port 1. The Baud Rate seemed to make little difference so I set it to the highest available.
I then used the Sky Demon Plan (evaluation copy) to flight plan and then transferred this to the GPS unit by using "Windows Mobile Device Centre" which is a free download from the Microsoft website.
A tip here is that whilst you have the unit connected to your internet connected Laptop or PC, you can directly load Tafs and Metars and Notams to your GPS device and then refer to this later at the flying club or in the air.
I have carried out a number of airborne tests in my Piper Arrow III, using the provided suction mount (actually stuck to the second altimeter in front of the right seat) and angled towards the pilot and plugged in to the cigar socket on the panel.
I found that it works very well indeed, but the screen could do with being a bit brighter in the high light level of the cockpit.
Although it is a 5" device, it is still a bit small for a full moving map device, so goodness knows what the smaller PDA and Phone devices are like
I found that using the touchscreen stylus was sometimes a bit difficult if there was any turbulence, but if the unit is set up correctly before flight it should look after itself as the aircraft icon resets itself as it comes near the edge of the screen.
What now? Well I plan to buy a new Chinese 7" GPS unit with a much higher resolution from Ebay (about 100 quid + delivery) and load its WIN CE operating system in the same way as I have described above. I expect this to be about the optimum for the cockpit of the Piper Arrow and I will report my findings when I have bought and tested it.
I asked Tim Dawson on the Sky Demon forum about modifying his software to work on Apple devices like IPod and IPad, but he is not keen on this as it involves a huge amount of work and royalty payments to Apple. But one interesting development is that Sky Demon will be selling their own GPS devices loaded with their software soon. If this is on a unit that is bright and relatively high def, it will, in my opinion, be the best GPS non integrated (i.e. removeable) device available for purchase for light aviation and this will be, I'm informed by Tim, for less money than any of the other comparable units.
Best of luck
BTF