Well, I took the plunge on the 4G dongle option but have yet to fly and see how it works.
I did turn things off and on a few times and the PAW connected to the WIFI 'hotspot' very quickly each time. Traffic was shown nicely. Even though the iPad was connected successfully to the PAW WIFI and doing things correctly (GPS position, traffic etc) it did take a while for the Internet to start coming down the tubes and into the iPad. This could be seen by the whirling circle on the left of the PAW WIFI on the WIFI settings, the lack of a nice WIFI cheese at the top, right of the iPad and, of course, a lack of SkyDemon winds and, also, access to websites. Once the whirling circle was replaced with a blue tick, WIFI cheese etc, everything worked nicely. There just seems (to me) to be a delay while the PAW router sorts things out and starts sending Internets to the iPad over the PAW WIFI.
The dongle is velcroed to the fabric floor of the aircraft underneath the seats, so should get a pretty good view of all that is below it. I did experiment with the supplied external antennas but, once again with a 4G dongle/router, found it actually had fewer bars. SO no external antennas attached.
I'm looking forward to going flying and seeing that it all works but, already, I do like the convenience of just turning on the power and letting things connect automatically, without having to turn on phone hotspots etc.
Stand by for a happy or sad face