Brief review of Anywhere WX

A couple weeks ago I started a thread inquiring about the various PDA/tablet
moving-map/satellite weather packages available. After a lot of deliberation
I ended up buying ControlVision's Anywhere WX/Anywhere Map system and an
iPaq 4705 PDA. I used the system for the first time this evening and was
very pleased with it.

I had previously setup the PDA and installed the Anywhere software which
took approximately 1/2 hour at home. (A word about the PDA - buy it on your
own rather than from Anywhere - you pay around $625 from them; I bought a
new one for $500 from an eBay retailer.) Following their instructions, it
took me about 35 minutes setting up everything in the airplane to the point
where I had GPS and WX connectivity. This included installed the yoke mount,
GPS, and WX Worx receivers, and running the power called to all three, and
then setting up the iPaq's Bluetooth and then the Anywhere software.

With it working on the ground, I decided to go for a short flight and see
how I liked it in the air.

I had played with the software in flight-planning mode and was impressed
with it.. Especially the finder and the way it did partial searches for
airports, navaids, and fixes based on proximity. WAY easier to enter a
flightplan with this system than with the 4 arrow buttons on my Garmin 295.
That's going to be very welcome for handling those unexpected IFR
re-routings.

2nd major improvement over the 295 I noticed right away was the information
available on the map. Superimposed on the map are groundspeed, bearing,
track, distance to next waypoint and dest, and time. You have to go to
different pages to get all of this with the 295 which is a pain, even when
you're displaying the HIS next to the map.

As for the display, the 4705's display is a bit bigger than the 295's (or
296's), is brighter, looks better, and updates much faster.

And then there's the weather. Man, is that cool. Next to each airport is a
colored square that tells me ceiling and vis at a glance (last METAR).
There was no precip in the area at the time but I know what a boon it's
going to be to have that NEXRAD available on the map.

The only glitch I noticed was that occasionally the weather update was 1-2
minutes late. It's supposed to update every 5 minutes and twice it went to
7 minutes (this is also displayed on the map). I'd consider this pretty
minor.

I can't compare this system directly to a competing PDA-based map/weather
system, but I can say that it worked perfectly for me out of the box and is
a huge improvement over the dedicated Garmin unit for my needs.

~Paul Folbrecht
~PP-SEL-IA
~C-152 N89795
~MWC

Recently, Paul Folbrecht posted:
[...]

2nd major improvement over the 295 I noticed right away was the
information available on the map. Superimposed on the map are
groundspeed, bearing, track, distance to next waypoint and dest, and
time. You have to go to different pages to get all of this with the
295 which is a pain, even when you're displaying the HIS next to the
map.

Did you try customizing your 295's screen? Display parameters are
user-selectable from a number of options. I have the distance next,
waypoint next, speed, ete next, course, altitude, track and cross-track
displayed next to the map.

Regards,

Neil

Paul Folbrecht wrote:
A couple weeks ago I started a thread inquiring about the various PDA/tablet
moving-map/satellite weather packages available. After a lot of deliberation
I ended up buying ControlVision's Anywhere WX/Anywhere Map system and an
iPaq 4705 PDA. I used the system for the first time this evening and was
very pleased with it.

Does the thing still go off into the weeds for ten seconds at a time
while it eats a chunk of weather from the datalink? That was happening
during their demos at Oshkosh last.

In article ,
Ron Natalie wrote:
Does the thing still go off into the weeds for ten seconds at a time
while it eats a chunk of weather from the datalink? That was happening
during their demos at Oshkosh last.

No. Weather does take some processing power, but the newer PocketPC
PDAs should all do pretty well. The latest release of their software
makes several speed improvements. I notice virtually no delay when
downloading/processing weather. It is relatively transparent.


JKG

In article ,
Ron Natalie wrote:
Does the thing still go off into the weeds for ten seconds at a time
while it eats a chunk of weather from the datalink? That was happening
during their demos at Oshkosh last.

I will also mention that these newer systems are being sold with
XM/Baron Services as the weather provider. I'm not sure how the
previous method of satellite phone weather may have impacted system
performance.


JKG

Jonathan Goodish wrote:
In article ,
Ron Natalie wrote:

Does the thing still go off into the weeds for ten seconds at a time
while it eats a chunk of weather from the datalink? That was happening
during their demos at Oshkosh last.


I will also mention that these newer systems are being sold with
XM/Baron Services as the weather provider. I'm not sure how the
previous method of satellite phone weather may have impacted system
performance.


No, I was referring to the XM datalink. It looks like more hp in the
PDA solved the problem. They seemed to think at the time it was a
solvable problem.

In article ,
Ron Natalie wrote:
I will also mention that these newer systems are being sold with
XM/Baron Services as the weather provider. I'm not sure how the
previous method of satellite phone weather may have impacted system
performance.


No, I was referring to the XM datalink. It looks like more hp in the
PDA solved the problem. They seemed to think at the time it was a
solvable problem.


I think the faster PDAs combined with optimized code probably helped
solve the problem. I believe that they re-wrote the XM protocol stack
for the newest code that was released recently, but had made several
optimizations to be previously.

I will say that I've seen new TabletPCs with WxWorx software show the
hourglass quite often during some operations. High-res terrain, map
features, and weather all require some horsepower.


JKG

As Jonathan said, it works fine. I noticed no delay at all. The screen
refreshes very quickly at all times.


On 6/22/05 1:38 PM, in article
, "Ron Natalie"
wrote:

Paul Folbrecht wrote:
A couple weeks ago I started a thread inquiring about the various PDA/tablet
moving-map/satellite weather packages available. After a lot of deliberation
I ended up buying ControlVision's Anywhere WX/Anywhere Map system and an
iPaq 4705 PDA. I used the system for the first time this evening and was
very pleased with it.

Does the thing still go off into the weeds for ten seconds at a time
while it eats a chunk of weather from the datalink? That was happening
during their demos at Oshkosh last.