I have found the same here with GSM and gprs in the city areas phones work
to about 2000ft up to 3000ft

In country areas 9000ft is good service.

thanks for the APRS info


"tango4" wrote in message
...
GPRS data service will not work over most of the UK at elevations above
about 2000' due to ground station antenna restrictions. I spent some time
talking to Virgin about using GPRS service whilst airborne and they had no
objections but using the phone still remained illegal. I have tested
reception of signal on 7 different phones in the air using sim cards from
different providers. Results vary widely. The best was with an old Nokia
6110 handset and BT / O2 simcard. I could make telephone calls from just
about anywhere. The latest phones are all but useless in the air most of
the time.

You'd be better off with a Ham packet radio solution ( APRS ) system.
http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/aprs.html
http://www.aprs.net/
http://www.aprs.co.uk/

Ian



"cernauta" wrote in message
...
"Mal" wrote:

Anyone seen this run or using it ?

http://www.vpos.no/demo.htm

Yes, seen in Elverum (WGC Club Class).
I believe that for the first time we have a real possibility to get
interest in a competition, while sitting on the ground.

The main differences compared to what I have seen till then a
. buffering the data in the transmitter, together with some delay in
the public display, allows for really continuos tracking
. mating the tracked data with a flight simulator alloes a really
impressive presentatio, as you will have seen in the sample movies on
the website.

bye

Aldo Cernezzi