On Sep 19, 8:25*am, Michael Ash wrote:
Alan wrote:
I just took my new 3G for a flight. gpstracker application works very
well to track flights on google earth. Also gives Long/Lat speed as
well as altitude every 5 seconds. Check it out.

*It might be fun, but it is also quite illegal.

*47 cfr 22.925 states:

* * 22.925 * Prohibition on airborne operation of cellular telephones.

[snip]

Aside from the use of "airplane mode", I seem to recall a discussion about
this a while ago wherein it was concluded that modern mobile phones don't
meet the FCC's definition of a "cell phone". The reasoning behind this
regulation is that using a cell phone in flight plays merry havoc with the
cell network due to seeing towers farther away than the network is
designed for. But modern networks work differently and are immune to this
problem, and I *think* the conclusion was that the regulation does not
apply to them.

Anyone know more about it? I'd like to know more than my patchwork
memory....

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon


As pilot in command of a non-IFR flight I grant myself permission to
use all kinds of electronic toys in flight. So that gets rid of FAA
concerns. However my belief is that 47 CFR. 22.925 does apply to the
iPhone since it is quad-band GSM that uses the GSM 850MHz band in the
USA. If you have say a different brand PCS phone that exclusively uses
1800MHz then this would not apply to you.

There is a wiki entry about this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_on_aircraft

In reality I turn my phone off to save battery life and distractions
like the phone ringing while I'm on final (it's happened).

So would I really want some new soaring software running on an iPhone?
Sure I could see lots of neat UI things that could be done (Cocoa is a
lovely UI to develop for) and the platform is powerful etc. The screen
is a bit more visible in sunlight than most PDA screens, but it is
still not really great. The downside of that is I'm set in my ways
with SeeYou, so if Naviter wanted to port across SeeYou keeping some
of it's core behavior/feature but offering an updated Cocoa UI/feel
then I might be interested. Except for a few issues...

I'm not going to use anything that does not talk to an external flight
computer, e.g. for extended NEMA sentences for improved wind
calculations etc. and I want to be sure my IGC logger is working OK so
getting the GPS from it is a way to test this. Also I really don't
want to mess with my iPhone as the display device in my glider, it's
my phone that gets messed with a lot. But I'd be happy to dedicate an
iPod Touch to this - in which case since it has no GPS you really need
an external interface. Unfortunately the iPhone SDK does not give
access to the serial port, and even if you had access to the serial
port you will need some RS-232 line driver hardware to shift voltages
to interface with a real RS-232 serial port in the GPS. The fact that
Apple did not include that in the iPhone makes me think they really
don't want to expose the serial port. The iPhone has bluetooth but
does not support a serial profile, so you can't connect to a
bluetooth GPS, or try to run a serial-bluetooth convertor on a flight
computer serial port etc. over bluetooth. And it's just a USB slave
(like a PDA) so you can't use a USB to serial translator. Then there
is the issue of no way to use a CF or SD card or USB dongle etc. for
flight log transfers and there is no third party code to run on it to
download flight traces from loggers etc. Sure something like ConnectMe
could be ported over (oops if there was just access to that danged
serial port), oh and opps there is no file management UI in the iPhone
so doing things nice and easily with log files etc. will be clumsier
than it should). You could use or implement something like FileMagnet
or DataCase and transfer log files over WiFi (of course that requires
a WiFi setup), or email the file, otherwise you are going to stuck
emailing file attachments or having to sync the iPhone to get off any
log files.

As it currently stands Apple's iPhone SDK license agreement has the
restrictions mentioned already in this thread "Applications may not be
designed or marketed for real time route guidance; automatic or
autonomous control of vehicles, aircraft, or ..." (it is the real time
route guidance that likely gets us, the "aircraft" stuff is irrelevant
since we are not talking about an automatic or autonomous control".
This restriction is in the SDK agreement, not just the iTunes store,
so the only way around this is to use a non-Apple SDK with a jail
broken phone. Then you are (questionably) violating other agreements.
For anybody to put serious effort into developing such software, even
if they wanted to open source it or give away binaries I doubt there
is a significant enough "market" in jail broken 3G iPhones and their
owners who want to put up with this. And while distributing through
the AppStore is neat, it has some serious pain in the ass issues for
higher end applications, starting with customer support say worthy of
0.99c applications. If somebody was serious and could get around the
serial I/O and other issues then they could try talking to Apple, they
might agree to modify route guidance restriction for a specific
application (but don't hold your breath).


Darryl