iFly GPS Forum

There is an way to make it work, we played with it a while back. But it's a bit convoluted - I believe stratux is going to add this capability in the future sometime.

You may want to consider a special we have going on right now - buy an iFly 740 and get a free Stratux! It's an awesome time to upgrade your iFly and get a Stratux, fully assembled and ready to go, for free.

Cheers,

Walter

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Walter Boyd
President, Adventure Pilot

Not sure yet. Right now we are building enough of these to support the Free Stratux campaign.

It is a single band receiver, just receiving WX and Traffic from the ground stations

Yes..

It doesn't. But Stratux has noted they are adding AHRS support - when done you should be able to upgrade the device without having to start over.

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Walter Boyd
President, Adventure Pilot

"I am a little disappointed with the gps in the Ifly 720 (sitting in my livingroom). With the 720 and Ipad sitting side by side (720 with the external antennae), the Ipad immediately provides gps signal to the IFLY software on the Ipad as well as to Foreflight. The 720 never connects. When I turn on and configure the Stratux, the 720 and Ipad connect very quickly."

There are several variables that can affect how long it takes a GPS receiver to start reporting a position.

Signal strength is one variable, but theoretically the 720's external GPS antenna should give it a leg up over the iPad there.

Your iPad has the ability to use "assisted GPS", for instance, which can take advantage of an internet link to help speed up the process of achieving an initial fix. Your 720 can't do that.

Part of what influences the time to initial fix is how good an initial guess the receiver can make about its current position and the location of the GPS satellites. Once a receiver has started getting GPS signals, over time it will gather the ephemeris or almanac data that are constantly being transmitted by each GPS satellite on a ~20-min repeating cycle. Once it has the full almanac, and it's developed a good location fix for itself, it will better be able to handle the various GPS satellites coming into / going out of view. But if it's been a long time since it's been used, the receiver may have "stale" almanac data and have a hard time figuring out which satellites it should be able to hear at the moment.

The iPad (or any other GPS-enabled mobile device with a wifi or cell data connection) can get all that information with essentially no delay.

But the iPad may not even be using GPS, really. Apple, Google, and other "Big Data" companies use reports from devices that have both GPS and wifi receivers to "map" the geographic location of wifi networks. Your iPad may be talking to a server that knows you home wifi geographic coordinates, and so if your iPad is connected to that wifi, it knows pretty well where the iPad is physically located. That's one way how your phone or tablet may still know its location even deep within a building that GPS signals can't penetrate.

So you might be sitting in a location in your house where the 720 can't really get a good GPS signal, but your iPad can still report its location because it's getting help from the internet instead of (or in addition to) its internal GPS.