iFly GPS Forum

Hi All - Call me a cheapskate but I'm just not ready to plunk down $2,000 for in air weather. But, at the same time, I'm getting tired of dogging summer afternoon thunder storms by just flying towards the light on the horizon. I'm sure that having a picture of real time radar would add a large amount of safety to flying around and between weather cells.

I have been looking into buying a 'WiFi Hot Spot' box ($40 for the box and around $10/GB from Sprint). I would think that my Android tablet could connect to the Hot Spot and I could have NextRad directly through iFlyGPS. Has anyone ever tried this? Does it work? How well? Sprint tells me that their signal is good up to 20,000 feet. Is that true? I seldom fly above 12,000 feet.

Thanks for any information concerning this.

Jim Williams

Jim, I've been using both ADSB and a Verizon hot spot for a little over a year. I use the hot spot as a back up, but it ends up being more reliable, as I often lose the adsb towers. With Verizon it was free, and just uses data from my family plan.(very little).
Greg

That's an often repeated bit of misinformation, but the only actual FCC prohibition that I can find applies only to the original 800 MHZ cell phone frequencies. Even if it were true, a hot spot is arguably not a cell phone.

What is true is that cell towers use antennas that put most of their signal lobe at or below the horizon. Providing coverage at altitude is not a priority to them.

To the originator of this thread: I tried the hot spot idea, and simply didn't find reliable coverage. (YMMV) I finally bought an ADS-B receiver and have much better results. I do wish that ADS-B worked on the ground though! I have to launch before I can discover if any local weather has popped up.

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Vaughn Simon Nexus 7 with Dual XGPS170