Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Bad Elf

I've been using the IPad + Foreflight as my EFB and have found it has really come in handy for IFR.  I bought my IPad the day it came out, and was bummed out when I found that a month later they came out with the 3G version that included a built in GPS.  I debated upgrading to the 3G to get the GPS, but I really didn't need 3G capability since my Sprint phone works as a WiFi hotspot and seemed hard to justify buying a whole other IPad just to add the GPS.  Needless to say, I was excited when I read about two newly approved GPS devices for the IPad on the Foreflight blog:  http://blog.foreflight.com/2010/11/09/external-ipad-gps-receivers-for-foreflight-hd/


I bought the Bad Elf unit from Amazon ($99) and had a chance to test it out in flight. It worked well but I was disappointed to see it never showed more than 10M accuracy.  It's supposed to be a WAAS GPS so I was hoping for 5 meters, but whatever... it's very accurate when comparing to the Garmin.  The Bad Elf locked on quickly and works well, I flew for 4.5 hours with the IPad on at full brightness and I have 34% battery left, so it doesn't drain much more battery either. The Bad Elf snaps into IPad pin connector, so I rotated the pad so it stuck out the top and then it didn't really get in the way, but you want to be careful not to bang it or I suppose you could bust the pins. Here is a quick video I shot with my phone. My conclusion is that if you have a WIFI only IPad this is a good solution for adding GPS to Foreflight. If you have the 3G I don't think you're going to get much more out of it if your GPS is already reliable, although future versions of Foreflight might make a difference.





1 comment:

  1. Hey Doog the bad elf website say's you’ll see the accuracy listed as 10m, after it comes thru the iOS Core Location APIs. The GPS chipset in the Bad Elf GPS actually provides data as precise as 2.5m though.

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