Wowee!

Up to now, I’ve been using a ‘cheap Chinese satnav’ modified to run Memory Map software for my flight navigation, and very well it has performed too. I originally flew down to the Dordogne from England in MYRO using a small unit with a 5″ screen and it worked faultlessly, bringing me to each waypoint ‘on the button’ and allowing me to locate tiny airfields en route that would otherwise have been needles in a haystack.

After arriving here, I have continued using the system very successfully and it gave me the confidence to venture out over quite long distances in the surrounding area without any fear that I would ever become uncertain of my position. Not only was that very reassuring, but it also allowed me to become very familiar with the area in a comparatively short time.

Along the way, I managed to damage my original 5″ unit so I moved on to one with a 7″ screen. However, like others before me, I found that the screen brightness of the larger unit wasn’t really good enough, especially in bright sunlight, so although I still have the 7″ satnav, which I now just use almost all the time in the car, I acquired another 5″ unit off Ebay, which has done sterling service up to and including my last flight.

But technology moves on and I’ve known for some time that tablets have taken over from satnavs for flight navigation as not only do they have faster processors and more on-board storage, but they also have much brighter, higher resolution screens. For most pilots who tour a lot, SkyDemon is the software of choice and if I had plans to start touring, it’s what I’d go for too. However, my Memory Map system is quite adequate for my present needs, especially as I can scan and load maps into it as I have done with the aeronautical map for France, but up to now I’ve had no experience of anything running the Android operating system (I don’t have a smartphone) and had no idea whether I could get it to run on an Android tablet, which most of the ones that are in my price bracket are.

That was until someone pointed out on one of the forums that Ebuyer in the UK had a very good offer on a 7″ Asus tablet (today’s price £59.99 with free delivery) that had the necessary built-in GPS, so I thought, ‘what the heck!’ and decided to bite the bullet and get one. And today my Asus Memo Pad 7, otherwise known as the Asus ME173X eventually arrived.

I’ve been amazed how quickly I’ve managed to get a feel for how it and Android work, even though I had to take time out repairing the broken pane of glass in my front window. In fact, not only did I manage to get a feel for the little rascal, I also managed to download the Memory Map app and get the software up and running and install my French aeronautical map! So now I have a complete and working Android navigation system with a lovely bright 7″ screen that I just can’t wait to try out for the first time.

Here’s a shot I took of the Asus’s screen showing a route in green that I created on my PC in the usual way and transferred onto the tablet. Also shown is the position marker in red, at my house, exactly as it has always appeared in Memory Map, except it’s much brighter and also locked onto the GPS system much more quickly than the old satnavs ever did.

You can’t directly transfer the route overlay from the PC to the tablet in the way that you could with Windows CE on the old satnavs. Instead you have to save it as a .gpx file on your PC and copy it over onto the tablet, but that’s a small price to pay, I think, for the advantages that the tablet technology will bring, not the least of which is a huge 10 hour battery life! It comes with the usual stuff, of course, like wi-fi, the Chrome browser, front and rear cameras etc etc, but I mainly got it for its ability to run my flight nav software, and so far I’m impressed. Very impressed!