> Mark, > I can't help with most of that stuff but the Ifly app is dissappointing at > best. I was sitting in light rain(but steady) and the closest rain that it > showed on the map was a good 25 miles away. It also does not pick up freezing > rain nor snow. The weather protion of the Ifly app is useless for our purpose > altough the rest of the navigation is fine and like youmentioned is pretty > intuitive.I also put that same question out a few weeks ago if the ADS-B > weather picked up to the definition that we are accustom to on the XM > weather. Jeff Scott was the only person to answer and he did not really know > how well the weather is depicted > Joe >
That's kind of a harsh assessment of the weather app. My observation is that it works pretty well. What I said I didn't know is how snow and freezing rain show up, as to whether they are painted blue or green. The weather radar depictions aren't native to iFly. They are native to what is being broadcast by the ADS-B tower, so that's what gets painted on the screen. There's a lot more to weather than just the weather radar app. For specific conditions, select the weather at the nearest reporting airport and that will give you winds, barometer, cloud cover, ceiling, precip, and type of precip. However, the weather conditions at a nearby airport using ADS-B are often times quite stale. Once you pick up a weather report for an airport, often times it doesn't get updated for up to an hour. Again, that is a function of ADS-B, not the iFly app. One of the interesting aspects of the FIS-B service is that it often times doesn't do much if there isn't any significant weather in the area. I often times find that the ADS-B tower simply doesn't show up or the weather updates are really slow and stale. But if there is significant weather in the area, like thunderstorms, the FIS-B service wakes up and starts streaming broadcasts. Typically when there is a thunderstorm in the area, I can suddenly receive the FIS-B service when sitting on the ground in Santa Fe or Los Alamos, and the radar updates are typically at 3 minute intervals and highly accurate. This seems to be true regardless of whether I'm in the plane with ADS-B out or the one that has FIS-B receive only. One of the disappointments of the FIS-B service is that they are not including TFR data, even though you'll see the FAA repeatedly stating that FIS-B does include TFR data. -Jeff Scott
