On Tuesday, July 12, 2016 at 10:21:54 PM UTC-4, wrote:
I am now the proud owner of an iPad mini 4, and now I need to get a GPS receiver so I can use IGlide. It looks like there are two options. Sky pro xgps160 (uses blue tooth), or bad elf gps for lightning connector. Does anyone have any experience with these?

I have the Garmin GLO and it works very well. 12 hour battery life, you can pair more than one device to it and it also receives GLONASS. Connection is wireless, so you can position the GLO where it can see the sky all the time and put the phone where you want.

I've also found that the iPhone 6 GPS works pretty darn well (east coast, U..S. flying)- within a couple hundred feet at worst, usually much better. Using just the iPhone I have lost the GPS signal from time to time -pretty infrequently, and it always reacquires after a few seconds.

In fact, the phone GPS works so well, I would only use the external GPS for flights I wanted to log accurately or lengthy XC flights that you want a stable GPS signal for. The advantage of the external GPS is, of course, you have two receivers instead of one. I'll point out that the glider I'm flying also had a 302 in it as a completely separate backup. The GLO has no screen on it, so you couldn't rely on it to give you heading info if you iPhone quit for some reason (say, it overheats because of sunlight and shuts down for awhile to cool off). If the Bad Elf has a way to guide you to a waypoint and you have no backup GPS device, that would swing the balance for me to the Bad Elf.

And +1 for iGlide. EASY to use and plenty of features. Once you swallow the Pro purchase price, you don't need to look back and each time you upgrade your phone, you get new hardware without needing to include new software cost in it. I've had no problems reading the screen in flight and use a suction cup mount from a GoPro with a phone holder for it.

I have added an external battery pack for the iPhone. I keep it in the side pocket and if the phone gets below 50%, I plug it in and it recharges the phone. Pretty simple. I've had no failures with the iPhone but that's the kind of thinking that lulls you into believing you'll *never* have a failure. I believe in planning accordingly, so always have backup systems (separate GPS and paper map) with me.