iFly GPS Forum

As a long time user of IFLY -  and in the hope that they will continue to upgrade their product, may I respectully request that you do whatever it takes to make IFLY compatable with the current XM weather receivers available on the market.   

For the second time - a significant line of thunderstorms developed along my route of flight AFTER I took off from my departure airport.   In the first instance, I was communicating with my son via texting and he kept telling me I would encounter a large line of thunderstorms before my destination airport.    ADSB was showing absolutely NO weather at all.  Not even a green speck.   I landed short and went into the FBO and sure enough - it was a huge system headed my way.   Took about four hours of waiting before I could continue on my way.

A couple of weeks ago, on  a trip from Oklahoma to Tucson, Arizona the same thing happened again.  Fortunately,  I was using flight following and the controller told me about the storms and helped me deviate around them.   It was one of those grey overcast days and with the haze and no sun - it was not evident to my eyeballs that the storms were that intense.

This is not an IFLY problem, but rather an ADSB problem.  According to IFLY, the TIS-B signal was not being received - so no weather.    I have Foreflight and Garmin Pilot too - and neither of them had any weather signal at all.   Clearly a failure of the ADSB system.   I absolutely do not and can not trust ADSB weather any longer.  And yes, I rebooted everything several times trying to get the signal.  It just was not there.  I was getting traffic and GPS from my Stratus 3 - but no TIS-B.

Upon reaching Tucson, I obtained a subscription to XM weather.   

There are all sorts of reasons that I prefer IFLY to the other apps, but it is time your guys stepped up to the plate and get XM weather to work on your app.   Seaking for myself, XM weather has become a Go/NoGo item for my cross country travels, so the app that I will continue with in the future must have that capability.

Regards

Rondey Wren

While I generally agree that XM weather is significantly superior to the weather that comes in over ADSB, I can tell you that there are some strange anomalies in the way the various ADSB receivers convey weather information and this may be playing into what you have been experiencing.

I have never been successful in receiving live weather on either of my Stratux devices, but on a recent trip up in a friend's Mooney I was getting solid weather updates for the entire two and a half hour trip from Arizona to California using his Stratux.

So, we tried an experiment recently where we brought up four different Stratux devices as well as a Stratus 3 and an Astro. These were all linked up to a handful of tablets, each running iFly.

The results were completely unpredictable.

Even the two retail devices sometimes showed a TIS-B heartbeat while simultaneously showing no actual weather (much like all of the Stratux boxes). This is Arizona during monsoon season - there is always active weather.

I have no explanation for this and as soon as iFly does actually support XM I'll be purchasing one of those devices.