Took my PilotAware box along to Netherthorpe today, and took it up for a local flight this in the Eurostar this afternoon. The pilot aware box was powered on for 4 hours continuously (running off a Portapow battery pack) with no issues. I simply strapped the box to a A4 file behind the seats as a first trial, don't know if this is optimal or not.
A friend was in the left hand seat which left me free to play with the Nexus 7 (2012, running KitKat 4.4.1 with PilotAwareAndroid and SkyDemon installed). Had the setup running for a couple of hours before we set off, plenty of commercial traffic detected flying at altitude over the airfield.
On departing Netherthorpe, SkyDemon did not detect we we moving, still giving our position as on the ground at the airfield, despite being 5 miles south of the field. The detected traffic continued to move on the display however, so the ADS-B side of things was still working. Quit PilotAwareAndroid and SkyDemon, restarted PilotAwareAndroid (let it detect the WiFi hotspot, and fix GPS position) then restarted Skydemon and connected to the PilotAwareBox. GPS position then correct and remained so for the duration (75 minute) of the flight.
Plenty of commercial traffic detected well above us but despite it being a busy Saturday afternoon for GA traffic, none of the other light aircraft we spotted showed up on PilotAware - an indication of the lack of take up of ADS-B I guess (its something we're looking at doing with our aircraft, but we've not implemented it yet). An interesting first test, I was getting a 'blip' every 2 seconds on 869.4 on a handheld scanner so I'm fairly sure the unit was transmitting, but I've no indication of how well the signal is propagating.
