Well, the iPad mini is about £450 plus Sky demon at £180 (only £90 renewal) makes the combination £630.

With quite a few good android devices available for £150-£200 it is a shame that SkyDemon doesn't run on them as we could be talking half the price.

Skydemon is great and well worth the subscription. I'm just not sure about £450 for an iPad mini can be justified.

I have a portable for most work and an iPhone for messages, email and checking on things when out and about.
I can't see that I'd use the iPad mini for anything other than flying.

Steve6443, I'm not sure why you took offence to Nick's very polite reminder about the question that he asked in the OP. The thread can quickly drift off if people do not stick to the topic. Instead you decided to discuss a product can is of no use to most people on the forum. Sky Map is a product for Germany only. That does not help any of the contributors to this topic.

Zulu Alpha, the cheapest iPad Mini 3G (with GPS) is £369. If you already have an external GPS then you can get the wifi model for £269. It's still not as cheap as a Nexus 7 (a very nice device, but no Sky Demon), but it's much cheaper than a Garmin. I'm hooked on Sky Demon, so it has to be iOS for me (for flight planning - its only a backup for navigating)

I'm seriously thinking about buying an iPad Mini wifi (I have an external GPS) and selling my iPad 3 on EBay.

Its about £100 more for the GPS/3G model. An external GPS is £60-70 so I think the internal one is probably the better option as it saves worrying about charging an extra set of batteries for the bluetooth GPS, and you can use 3G.

I did wonder how much memory I will need in the iPad. I have 16G on my iPhone and only a little over 1G unused. I thought that 16G might be a little light for an iPad mini.

Anyone have any suggestions on how much memory to purchase? (it must be the most expensive memory in the world!)

£369 is the 3G/GPS model (not £450, unless you're getting 32GB model).

An external GPS, in my opinion, is better than the built-in GPS, because you get a more reliable GPS signal with no dropouts, I don't have to worry about the iPad having sight of the sky (useful if I want to just store the GPS track - I can keep the iPad in my flight bag in the back of the aircraft) and the iPad battery doesn't drain as fast. An external GPS will generally use a rechargeable battery that lasts 10-12 hours of usage, so more than enough for a couple of days of flying. You can re-charge them very easily using a USB cable. But if you will be using 3G on it, then you obviously need the 3G model. I have a 3 MyFi to create a wifi hotspot, which works well in-flight.

As for the amount of storage you need, that depends on what you will be using it for. I have quite a few maps on Air Navigation Pro and Sky Demon, a large number of non-aviation apps, and I only have 2.7GB free on a 16GB model.
Air Nav Pro uses 1.6GB
Sky Demon uses 800MB

For those asking about the Nexus 7, you might like to try PocketFMS (30 days free trial). I works on Android devices as well as iPad/iPhone and covers all of Europe, North America, Australia & New Zealand.

For clarity I am a beta tester for PFMS, but have no financial involvement.

In relation to iPad over heating, I've only had one. It was on a reasonably warm summers day but not exceptionally warm. It was perhaps 20C but bright sunshine.

I put my iPad 3 onto the combing for maybe 3 minutes while I arranged myself and when I took it down it was overheated. I took it down and after 5-10 minutes it was working again.

dp

I read of mixed reports from the USA about the Ipad2 overheating. Some had it, others never.

However it must depend strongly on whether there is direct sunlight, and how much cooling there is. I know this because I fly with a tablet (an old LS800) which runs far hotter in direct sun, and far hotter in the absence of ventilation. The LCD backlight also makes a big difference.

I reckon if you lay an Ipad onto your knees (i.e. no cooling on the back) and have sun on the top, and have the backlight on max (which you have to in such conditions) it would get way too hot.

If OTOH you somehow mount it in a holder, so there is airflow all around, it would be very hard to get it too hot.

The problem with any device that dissipates a few watts or more, cooled by convection alone, is that it will be extremely sensitive to what is around it. Fairly obvious really, given that conduction/convection/radiation is all that stops its temperature reaching infinity :)

Most of the ipad holders I have seen, including the one I use myself , have a backplate which would indeed restrict cooling. However I have had no uncommanded shutdowns myself on my ipad2, even where mounted in direct sunlight.

You can't really fault the iPad and the iPad + Skydemon combo is THE ONLY combo as far as I am concerned. It is brilliant. Never had a problem - using New Ipad with internal GPS and it seems very accurate and never loses GPS signal and never known one to overheat.

However I would prefer to use an Android Tablet, and my Motorola is superior to the iPad technically, plus you can slot in a 64GB memory card available for £20. However Skydemon is not available for Android (yet) so it is not an option as far as I am concerned. I believe the Skydemon team are working on this though, so rather than buy an iPad (I nick the Mrs's at the moment ;) ) for myself I think I'll just wait a while.

iPad mini (no GPS) and GNS 1000
 

I've just tried the above setup and failed! iPad is bluetoothed to the GNS but when I opened Sykdemon it just had a big green bar across the screen saying "Looking for Satellites" and I cannot figure out how to wirelessly connect the two. Any tips?

Just looked on the SkyDemon website only to discover that it won't talk to the GNS GPS. So good to find this out after spending £204 on SkyDemon. I would have thought that important limitations like this would be writ large on SkyDemon's website.

Ah well, back to the Pilot III until I decide which other software to throw money at.

Well, to be fair to SkyDemon, it's probably not the SD software that is at fault.

The "Location Services" of the iPad (any version) will not accept a simple NMEA data stream, but only accepts input from external GPSs in some Apple specific format or encoding. To the best of my knowledge, there are only three external devices that supply this specific format. Bad Elf, Garmin Glo and one other. Most of these use BlueTooth as their carrier, but Bad Elf also has a device that plugs into the iPad directly.

Just pairing the iPad with a generic BlueTooth-supporting device is not enough. This is because Bluetooth consists of a number of subprotocols and not all devices support all subprotocols. Furthermore, there is no standardized BT "GPS" protocol. I suspect the "default" BT/GPS protocol would be something like NMEA on top of RFCOMM on top of Bluetooth. And I presume Apple has implemented something proprietary on top of BT for GPS data, which is only supported in the Garmin Glo, Bad Elf and that other one.

Bluetooth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To make matters worse, the iPad is a fairly closed device. The complete BT stack and the complete Location Services stack is part of the iOS suite, and I doubt SD would be able to access the core, low-level BT functions to implement their own NMEA/RFCOMM stack (or something else) on top of raw BT to support other GPS/BT devices.

All this technical mumbo-jumbo means it's not SDs fault. Air Nav Pro, PocketFMS and similar products would be equally affected. (And would equally benefit from getting an iPad compatible GPS such as the Garmin Glo, Bad Elf and that other one, without having to do a software update or anything.)

True that only some external GPSs are supported, but the GNS 1000 is supposed to be one such. I don't understand why Skydemon wouldn't support it, therefore. This thread:

iPad4 and GNS1000

suggests you're wrong.

Where did you get the idea Skydemon doesn't support the GNS1000? Have you asked them direct?

Apologies for the rant, I was a little ticked off that it wasn't working as advertised. The SkyDemon website had threads about the GNS units not being supported but I now realise that it's the GNS 2000 with it's GLONASS that isn't supported.

Now relaxing with a glass of Merlot and the iPad and GNS sitting on my desk I now have 0.0GS and an aircraft image sitting over my house so it appears that the nav function does work. If there isn't a Gale Force 10 across the strip tomorrow I'll give it another shot and let y'all know how I got on!

tmmorris, it all worked a treat, thanks fr the advice. Cheers, :ok::ok:

Rob (SkyDemon) here,

I should probably clarify that there were initially some serious problems with the GNS 2000 (early units were flawed in some way that I will not pretend to understand), but I understand that those have now been resolved by GNS themselves, or by the stockists who were trained to apply the fix.

I have a number of happy chaps who run the GNS 2000 with their iPads, but if anyone does have a problem, to contact GNS directly. You may have got one of the original batch...

I used a full size iPad 3 with Foreflight. I didn't have a mount, just had it on the seat beside me when solo, or my wife held it when she was on board.

Now use iPad mini, initially dithered over making the move to the mini thinking it may be too small with the sectional displayed on it, but having flown with a friend and sampled it first hand in the cockpit, I was sold on it, don't really feel the size is of any issue, added plus with the mini, I now have it secured on a knee mount.

Full size iPad is still on board along with my paper charts just in case I lose the mini or the panel GPS.

No overheating issues with either version, and my flying is mainly in the heat and humidity of Florida.

GNS2000
 

Gents,

I have read a large number of comments about the GNS1000 performance, I took quite some interest in it so I went searching for buying it on the web.
I discovered that it has been superseded by the GNS2000 about which I could not retrieve so many information.

Any body has direct experience with it? Does it suffer similar issues like the 1000 brother?

Cheers,
ZN

I have a GNS2000 since almost two years. It is rock-steady.
I use a Nexus7 (Kitkat 4.4.4) with GPS Bluetooth Provider (essential) and SkyDemon.
Lollipop 5.0.2 is not stable with SD, better stay on 4.4.4 or wait for 5.1 (imminent).

I also use a Lenovo Yoga2 10" tablet, reasonably priced, very long battery life (40+ hours), also available in 8" and 13.3" sizes.

Thanks Dirk, have you ever tried it on an Apple device?

I manage the hardware for a friend pilot too. He has a Nexus7/GNS2000 combo same as mine, also an iPad where we couple the XGPS160A. I don't see there would be any problem with GNS and the iPad.
If you already have the iPad, I would order a GNS2000 from one of the major on-line retailers. If it doesn't work, you can send it back within 30 days. On the SkyDemon forum you can get plenty of help to get it working.

The GNS2000 is quite a bit smaller than the XGPS160A. On the XGPS you can fairly easily connect multiple Bluetooth devices (up to 5, I tried 3).