At LONG last I have finally flicked the PAW switch on and I have to say I am a happy camper
I have the Classic shell, because it will be permanently-fitted with external antennas and I like the small size of the Classic box. I have retrofitted a Pi 3B+ and the old Pi 2 will be used for my ADSB receiving 'station' when I set it up in the UK. As I'm just playing at the moment, the G-Mouse GPS antenna is sitting on a window sill, as is the 'normal' ADSB antenna.
First of all I followed the instructions for formatting the SD card and chose to use an 8GB card, as some people on the Forum seem to have had problems with higher capacity cards. I did the complete overwrite format as instructed and that was very easy using the recommended formatting software. I then downloaded the June 2019 software and copied the files into the root of the SD card, popped it into the PAW and plugged in power. I was expecting the initial loading process to take about 20 minutes but it was finished in about 4 minutes and the red and green lights were alternately blinking.....a good sign that the Pi 3B+ internal WIFI was doing its thing.
I connected up to the PAW WIFI signal and went to the 'Config' page to see what was what. On the main page I could already see the GPS block was green (despite the GPS antenna being indoors and on the window sill) and the Baro seemed to be good as well. The PAW & ADSB were red but that was to be expected as I hadn't put in the licence key at that point.
Because I'd bought my PAW about 4 years ago and because I'd changed the original Pi to a newer fancy one, the first time user licence key didn't work but a quick email to Keith and he sent me a new one. Once that was inserted and saved everything kicked into life and I was able to set up Mode S/C stuff etc. A visit to the Home Page showed four blobs of green and the radar showed about 20 airline contacts, with their associated information
I've got a trial version of SkyDemon running at the moment but enabled PAW in the SD menu and told SD to 'Go Flying'. Lo and behold, loads of ADSB traffic on my SD map, so an even happier camper.
After re-reading one of the posts about loss of GPS position I changed the setting in PAW from Auto to Pilot Aware (UDP) and then went back to SD and told it to 'Go Flying' again. This time there was no delay in connecting, whereas before I had a warning about losing GPS position (with 15 in view) and a delay of around 4-5 seconds before it plotted my position. Obviously no being deal but the UDP setting seems to work very well.
I am now making sacrifices to the weather gods in order that I can collect my aircraft from the great guys at Eurofox and bring her back to her very posh toy box at Sandown. Then I will be able to complete the installation and have all the goodies on display. I am still in two minds whether to pipe the PAW information onto the MGL EFIS maps. Apparently the traffic symbols are very small, so I may well just stick to the SkyDemon display and, perhaps, a PAW radar on my old iPhone 5 for a simple picture of traffic only.
To be honest, after some of the stories I'd read on the Forum about difficulties in installing software, GPS not seeing things, WIFI not connecting I was dubious about setting things up. In reality it was very easy and went far more smoothly than I anticipated. Yes, I know it hasn't flown yet but that's the fun bit.
I am a happy PAW bloke
