Hi Peter,
This certainly is a strange one.
You say you were running ‘the latest version’ of PilotAware - can you just confirm that this was 20180520.
Having run various PilotAwares for many hundreds of hours over 3 years, both in development and ‘for real’, I have on a couple of occasions experienced being able to connect my tablet to the PAW WiFi hotspot but not being able to get SD to connect to PilotAware - which was due to a UDP issue - now fixed in the 20180520 software, but I can’t say I have ever experienced ‘seeing’ the PilotAware Hotspot and not being able to connect a device (tablet or phone) to the Hotspot, so I’m struggling to understand how you were getting this from 2 completely different devices - 1 Android and 1 iOS at the same time.
I would have to say that you were in a somewhat unusual situation - departing from Aero-Expo, there would presumably have been lots of PilotAware WiFi Hotspots around at the same time. There certainly were during my recent visits to Popham, and Eshott for ‘Fly-the-Tyne’, which would make it difficult to ensure your device(s) connect to the correct device. Are you quite certain the one you ‘saw’ was your own? I am aware that the new software takes a fair bit longer to boot up before the hotspot becomes active than previous versions - and I’m running a Pi3. Your Classic will take even longer, so you could just have been seeing someone else’s hotspot, which your devices wouldn’t necessarily connect to. Just a thought.
Regards
Peter R