Garmin Datalink Weather for Europe

[N666LG]

Garmin have a product imminently available called the GSR 56, which appears to be an XM type datalink weather/comms system for Europe. Anyone have any knowledge of when and if this will be available for an Sr22 and costs?

[IO540]

AFAIK there is no satellite broadcast here so they would be doing what Avidyne do with the MLX770 which is basically an Iridium satellite phone in a box, with a contract SIM card in it.

I did some digging on this a year or so ago and could not find any real indication of costs.

[wigglyamp]

It's expected to be available for US-registered aircraft in Q4/2010 and will interface to G1000 and next software versions of G500/600. Operating costs are likely to be similar to Avidyne, so around $8/hr if downloading route-related weather 4 times/per hour. I believe it was launched at Oshkosh. I think it'll be a little later in Europe as EASA approval will be needed on the equipment and there won't be an AML STC for EU-registered aircraft, so individual approvals per type min EASA's normal manner.

[IO540]

What do you get for the $2 download?

At Iridium's listed phone rates (I am sure Garmin and Avidyne don't pay those) $2 is about 1 minute online, which at Iridium's only available data rate of 2400bits/sec is about 15kbytes of data (allowing a bit for DHCP etc).

[wigglyamp]

The received weather will be much like XM in the US. Winds aloft, TAF, METAR, weather radar (Garmin have Spanish radar data as well, unlike Avidyne).
Where it differs from XM is in the delivery. XM gives you a continuous update, whereas the Iridium system will only deliver data based on your requested update rate, which is typically 4 times an hour. Your GPS route is sent to the control centre, and your weatehr is relayed back to you, based on the width of corridor you specify. Maybe if you're going from Shoreham to Geneva, you may specify 100NM width to allow for diversion. The wider the corridor you request, the more data you downlaod and so the more expensive it becomes.
Garmin's unit will also give you SMS text messaging via the MFD (G500/600 or G1000) as well as duplex voice calls, so a legal on-board mobile phone!

[northwatch]

That sounds quite interesting. My plane is just now in the shop getting a G600 with the GSR56 (ant GTN750 and GTN650). According to the manuals SMS will not (yet) be available on the G600 (only the G1000). But you can make and receive voice calls. The GTNs do not (yet) support GSR56, neither for WX, nor SMS, nor voice. One more thing which obviously IS supported by G600/GSR56 is position reports. However, I haven't found out what that means exactly.

I hope my plane will be ready by mid/end February. I'll keep you updated then, if you like.

Richard

[stickandrudderman]

if you like.
I like.....

[Daniel_Monaco]

Garmin has published all information including pricing on their GRS-56 weather subscription service on the following page:
https://fly.garmin.com/fly-garmin/gfds-weather/

GTN series are announced to be supported "soon"

[peterh337]

This has been possible for several years with the MLX770 box, which is about £10k to install, plus a not insignificant running cost of the Iridium satellite phone delivered weather data.

I don't see Garmin doing it any cheaper, knowing the history of the company and the basic limitations of how to do it in Europe.

[achimha]

I think the Moving Terrain (http://www.moving-terrain.de/lang-en/produkte/software-module/mt-satellite-radar.html) is a much more versatile solution for less. Even better would be an Iridium module for the iPad.

[peterh337]

The problem with MT is that their box is too damn big for many or most cockpits (as I mentioned further up the thread).

There is no way AFAIK of connecting any kind of external internet connection to an Iphone or Ipad, apart from via WIFI or possibly via bluetooth. No satellite phone I know of offers WIFI (eg along the lines of what Joikuspot does for normal GSM phones). USB networking is not supported. So that leaves bluetooth.

I did some work (http://www.peter2000.co.uk/aviation/satcomms/index.html) on this a while ago. I am pretty sure that there is no Iridium or Thuraya phone which will connect to an IOS device via bluetooth, due to the extremely limited range of bluetooth devices which the Church of Jobs decreed should be available to the great unwashed.

There is no way to do dial up networking on an IOS device, unless it is jailbroken and you want to pay somebody to write the code. DUN is the standard way of doing this on windoze devices, and works straight out of the box.

In principle, somebody should be able to write an IOS app which contains some kind of a browser (such apps already exist e.g. PrintBureau) and which connects to an external device over bluetooth, and actually gets an internet connection that way. The XGPS150 "Dual GPS" uses bluetooth in this way to communicate with their little GPS utility, and thus bypasses another Church of Jobs Decree which is that an app should not have access to the GPS satellite constellation. The question is how much effort somebody wants to put into this....

[peterh337]

How would the inter-phone connection work (exactly) ?

[achimha]

Android 4 can act as a wifi hotspot (including DHCP) which your iPad can simply connect to.

One issue is how to control traffic. The Android phone will have lots of tasks trying to exchange data and so will the iPad. If an Android device is involved, one could directly go for an Android tablet and remove the need for an iPad.

[peterh337]

Lots of phones can act as wifi access points e.g. my Nokia 700 can and does run Joikuspot and can thus act as a gprs/3g to wifi converter, so to speak.

But I dont see how this helps with a satellite phone whose only means of connection is RS232 (which is good for DUN only) or USB (which works only as a Slave device, with a PC controller). Or bluetooth whose BT profile is not supported by IOS.

I would be interested in making something work. Currently I have a good enough but clumsy system which uses a Thuraya 7100 over 232 to an old windozd tablet.

[Slopey]

What about something like this? They have a router, and a wifi access point:

Web Accelerator Redport Satellite Router and Firewall Wxa-202 - Rp-wxa202 - 9555 Phone Accessories - (http://www.globalmarinenet.com/catalog/accelerator-redport-satellite-router-firewall-p-995.html)

Satellite Phone Data Optimizer, Router and Firewall | GMN (http://www.globalmarinenet.com/satellite-phone-data-optimizer.php)

[peterh337]

Very well found, Slopey:ok:

Looks like somebody has put in a lot of effort and done exactly the thing.

Interesting they have used USB /232 and not bluetooth which works poorly e.g. on Thuraya phones it comes up disabled at every powerup so you have to enable it in the config every time.

The 2nd link should be a good airborne solution, with its support for the old 232 Thuraya phones which tend to work best.

This was done for yachts which are long established satellite data users and tend to pay any price for the facility.

The feature which blocks stuff like Adobe updates is great and essential when providing wifi (where you may have little control over who attaches what to it) but in practice I found that if one uses a specific windows device, disabling the various auto updates is not hard. And in any case one must disable auto updates n any mission critical device, which is a big annoyance on e.g. The ipad where apps auto update (or keep pestering you if you dont obey the notifications which cannot be disabled) and often features are removed in the new versions.