[638RS]

For those of you who have bluetooth devices in your plane, what has your experience been as to reliability of connection ?

I am interested in the new Anywhere map ATC GPS but it uses a bluetooth connection to drive the autopilot and to connect to weather. My only experience with bluetooth is with my cell phone and it has a habit of losing connection fairly often.

Any input would be appreciated...

 

[N395V]

To me in cockpit computers, PDAs, and other wizard like gizmos are really fascinating. If I had the room I would have a cockpit that looked like the bridge on Startrek.

Over the last several years I have tried numerous systems and a lot of Blue tooth.

Blue tooth is consistent is 2 areas (in the cockpit)
1. It really takes a long time to get everything booted up and talking to each other
2. It almost always goes TU during the flight

It seems the newer and smarter (more complex) the equipment the worse it performs.

My son ecently installed a new Pioneer audio in his car with Hands free Blue tooth for a cell phone. Can't get them to play nice together. Of course Pioneer blames Nokia and Nokia pioneer. The final consensus is the nokia was too smart for the audio system and indeed a more basic bluetoth cell phone worked (sort of).

I really do not think Blue tooth is ready for prime time in an aircraft cockpit, and certainly would not use it to drive an autopilot.

I have been thinking of putting in a wireless router like is used for Stereo systems and other devices but haven't yet gotten around to doing the research.


I would avoid bluetooth and install the wiring as best as can be done to facilitate usage.

 

[breister]

I would agree - BlueTooth isn't ready for any mission-critical function. I think there is another thread on communications protocol standards and ideas for a reliable bus.

It really should be possible. TCP/IP is already designed to be reliable and re-routable (it was developed by DARPA to be war-damage resistant and self-healing). Modern embedded WiFi cards are extremely reliable, cheap, and some have embedded CPUs to take the data-link workload off of whatever device is communicating through them. The only downside is that they might be subject to hostile action (jamming; viruses; etc.) which probably isn't such an issue for us low-value targets.

Still, I think I'll stick to a wired solution for the time being. There are too many smart kids out there who think it is funny to disrupt other peoples' computers, especially if they think they can do it without showing their face...

 

[jhutch]

Bluetooth GPS

I have been using a PDA phone running Anywhere Map for a couple of years now. The Bluetooth GPS works flawlessly. I have found the gps upside down between passenger seat and the fusealage and it is still recieving signal.The biggest problem has been the the phone. Just upgraded to a tablet pc running Anywhere Map.

 

[Doug]

I have found bluetooth physical link layer links to be more than reliable. I don't have extensive experience of BT in cockpit but the times I have it worked flawlessly. No noted interference either way (BT with radios, txpondr, intercom and other electrical).

Where problems arise is with the interface and application software. It is nearly impossible to validate all combinations of BT equipment with specialised software.

For example, one of my pet peves is the NMEA data emitted from GPS receivers, NMEA is a poorly specified and implemented interface standard and can cause less than well crafted interface code to crash. If this happens with a bluetooth GPS - it is more likely not the fault of the bluetooth layer - yet without knowing the exact cause we simply throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There are some really good Bluetooth GPS around but often these will not work well with just any target application code:

http://www.gpspassion.com/forumsen/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=81990

I do suggest sticking with a Vendor endorsed combination of software/hardware and BT device.

BTW TCP/IP can happily run over a BT physical layer.

Doug