Skysight update during flight

[the_gle...@msn.com]

I think this one has been discussed before but sorry I cannot remember the outcome.

Early in my wave flight today I was seeing the Skysight wave prediction info. The time of the forecast was moving on appropriately. Later in my flight I lost the Skysight info - I think the LX9000 was connected to a hotspot on my phone, which will have been connecting to the cell network from time to time.

How does LX provide Skysight data during flight and what is the best way to use it for this purpose? Best would be to access updated forecasts, next best would be to continue to have access to forecasts from before takeoff.

Many thanks for any help on this.

Mark Burton, flying an Arcus M from London Gliding Club, UK

[Matthew Scutter]

For reasons unknown to me (I just do forecasts, I have nothing to do with LX software or hardware), it appears that if the LX is connected to the internet inflight, it sometimes deletes existing cached forecasts while attempting to update them, and if you gain and lose signal at an unfortunate time you may see blank screens.

So, if you are not certain you will not have reliable phone signal inflight, and you do not need the satellite image, I recommend to connect to wifi half an hour before takeoff with all your charts preprogrammed on pages so that it downloads everything before flight.

In my experience if you mount your phone ABOVE the canopy rail, such that it has line-of-sight to the horizon, despite what nonsense about European phone towers you may read on the internet or hear in the bar, 4G/5G will generally work fine up to FL100. Above that it can get patchy quite quickly.

Copilot appears to be somewhat more reliable but I have not tested it extensively in wave.

[Morgan Hall]

I may have experienced the lost cache issue yesterday as well. My phone was connected for over an hour prior to launch, plenty of time for caching the data.  Around 2.5 hours into the flight I noticed my convergence layer went blank.  I had most likely been out of coverage for a while and suddenly got low enough near a high-point of cell tower placement that I may have had signal.  It seemed like about 20 minutes and then it refreshed and I had information for the rest of the flight.  I'll try turning off my hotspot before I launch.

The delete before recache theory seems plausible. A bad design choice, but plausible.

Morgan

Morgan

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[John Johnson]

I've tried every method I can think of to capture and cache SS data on my 9070 prior to launch: 

  - shutting off the LX's wifi after seemingly acquiring a good download

  - timing download to avoid an untimely SS data refresh affecting the download in the timeframe I was connected 

  - timing download to avoid encountering a change in the UTC date while downloading 

  - allowing more time (up to an hour) for the download, and much less time (5min) before shutting down wifi

  - killing wifi and shutting the unit off after the download and then turning back on (no wifi) just before launch

  - leaving the unit turned on (with and without wifi turned on) after downloading

  I rarely see SS cached data working beyond the first hour of flight with any pre-launch download method.  I gave up and now leave my phone's hotspot turned on and LX wifi connected in flight.  I seem to now have SS data available about 60-70% of the time.  I noticed the data only seems to download for the screen you are looking at.  For example, if you have a thermal height screen and a convergence screen - only the one being displayed downloads when you acquire a cell connection.  The other screen's SS data will not start to download until you switch to it.  This means that even if you get a good cell connection, you won't get a SS data download unless you happen to be looking at that particular screen while the connection is active.  I'm guessing it almost never caches more than just the next one hour's data so I find I need a cell connection update (while looking at the SS screens) every hour.  

  Also, my phone (samsung A23) rarely makes a cell network connection if I leave it's wifi turned on in flight (this is different from using the phone's hotspot wifi capability).  I think the phone's wifi might be attempting to connect to the Fusion's wifi when cell coverage drops and, when I do get a good cell connection, it is spending too much time switching out of wifi mode before the cell connection is dropped again.  Turning my phone's wifi off (but with hotspot on) has greatly improved my cell connection frequency.

  I've documented my experience, suspicions, and suggestions in multiple bug reports and pre/post flight data dumps sent to LxNav.  They have responded and let me know that things like download progress messages, download integrity checks, user verification that a SS data update should proceed, etc are not easy to implement - even though I pointed out that's exactly what they do with other data download event types (like FLARM and airspace updates).  I suspect they are busy with Hawk and higher priority projects.  

  I recently started to use SeeYou Navigator on my phone as a backup flight computer.  I found its SS data to be very reliable so I haven't even tried looking at the LX for weather data on my last few flights.

JJ

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[Ramy Yanetz]

My experience is similar to John. I found the best thing to do is to keep the WiFi connection on during the flight and hope it will get enough cell signal to keep the cache going. I also noticed that my LX9000  looses the WiFi connection to my cell phone occasionally, requiring recycling the hot spot on my phone to reconnect to my Lx9000. 

Ramy

[Marc Teugels]

Despite of what Matthew said , nope , the European GSM reception in the air in Europe is extremely bad . Belgium nearly nothing above 1500ft , Netherlands a bit better , up to 3000ft , Germany OK only above towns, French Alps exceptionally good probably due to the mountains .
Keeping the phone above the frame should help indeed , but didn't see any clear difference.
Could be GSM dependant (actually a Samsung A72 , my previous Huawei was better as far as that is concerned) 
This will severely hamper the application of well-needed data in flight .
I asked Uros how the copilot implementation on the Beta Lx will interfere with the SS cached data. Will get back with the answer.

Anyway , suppose the European season draws to an end , making testing a bit of a problem :-)

So , the future is either in some external GSM antenna ? (any hints ?) or a future simple satellite receiver ? 

[Matthew Scutter]

I was waiting for this. I can really only stress again - actually mount your phone above the canopy rail. Don't just hold it up there for 10 seconds and expect it to get a signal.

Everywhere I go in Europe I hear "it's different here" and yet in all my gliders with all my phones over the last 5 years, it really works - not always and not perfect, sometimes dropping out for 15 minutes but at least reliable enough for regular satellite pics and weather updates. France, UK, Germany, Czechia, Poland, Slovenia, Lithuania, Norway, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Bosnia I all personally confirmed functional... yet to find somewhere that really doesn't work.

See my Facebook page for multiple live videos streamed inflight this year across Europe (i.e. https://www.facebook.com/MatthewScuttersGliding/videos/1138431610780026 notably over the mostly unpopulated Thuringerwald). If it was as bleak as I am often told that would surely be impossible. Just as of this year I started to get 5G reception inflight too which sometimes is even better.

I have lobbied LX for years to just add a 4G module, then we can have a coax to the tail and a proper 4G antenna.

Perhaps phones exist with bad baseband firmware that can't handle it (portable hotspots rarely work for this reason, they don't change towers aggressively enough), or perhaps people are flying with phones that don't actually support all the frequencies used in their country. I don't have explanations for the contrary reports.

What is also obvious from using Copilot and the LX inflight together is that the client software is a big factor too - Copilot (or even just the SkySight website) load much faster and more reliably than the LX. I have sent feedback along those lines with some network stack suggestions to LX.

Satellite downlink via 4G from Starlink et. al is probably inevitable and will be the ultimate 'fix', but still many years away.

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[Nelson Howe]

I have had pretty good luck downloading SS data on the ground, then turning off the hotspot on my phone.  In flight, I have my phone (Samsung S23 Ultra) in a Quad Lock phone case which locks in to the Quad Lock RAM ball adapter that goes in the ram mount on my control panel.  This holds the phone above the rail where I can interact with it.  I use SeeYou Navigator as a backup flight computer, and display satellite imagery on that.  With this setup I can see the clouds in relation to the task, which is really helpful.  When I want to look at convergence or XC speed, I look at cached data on the 9070.  It sometimes takes a couple seconds to load, but, with the hotspot off, it doesn't disappear.  Cell coverage comes and goes for the phone, but is good much of the time in the US.  The biggest drawback with this scenario is that there is no time stamp on the satellite imagery, so I don't know if I'm viewing a current image.  WeGlide's copilot also works, also displays the task, and does have a time stamp.  It also has a "play" button, which is helpful for figuring out if that shadow blob is coming closer or going further away.  For some reason, I prefer the look of the SeeYou Navigator display.  It is worth remembering that if you are using these aps in a US competition, you need to have "OGN" turned off for SeeYou Navigator, as it is a form of landbased tracker which isn't allowed.  I'm not sure if you are allowed to use the live features of Copilot: thermals, height of thermals, vertical speed.  They are land-based, but maybe only kind of tracking information.  I haven't heard this aspect of these aps discussed at a pilot's meeting yet, but it may be just a matter of time.

Nelson

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[cdeerinck]

I’ll prefix this with saying I love my LX, but frankly this should be embarrassing.

It needs to be fixed in the LX.  Downloading into a temp named file and doing a local copy on success is NOT a complicated fix.

It has been reported for a long time.  It’s crazy how long we all struggle because they don’t fix it.

At a minimum, let us load on the ground, and only get satellite updates in the air.

[Morgan Hall]

According to the email I got overnight from Uros, LX does not delete the cached data when trying to update.  Or at the very least it is probably fair to say it isn't supposed to.  I've never had a chance to look at the skysight API, but it sure seems like LX should be able to request 24 bundles(12hrs every half hour) worth of data for each layer and track how many of those were received.  Maybe they can't validate the data, but if I request N bundles and get N/2 I'd at least know I was only at 50%.

Flying carbon fuselage gliders, I'd expect getting the phone above the cockpit rail to make a difference. In the fiberglass Discus A and Duo I mostly fly, I don't think the fiberglass attenuates the signal much. But typically the problem is that mid-summer in the US west we might be 10,000agl and unless we are near a mountain that has towers on top, coverage in-flight is spotty.

Morgan

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[the_gle...@msn.com]

Thanks to everyone contributing. There are two annoying issues, we don't like what the LX does, and even less we don't like not knowing what it does!

When there is a connection, do others think LX only downloads data for the layer on screen at that time as someone suggests (I don't think that is the case}?

and/or only downloads data for a layer which is loaded on a current page, so that there will not be any data for a different layer (eg I have wave at 7,000 feet setup, as I get higher I want to change to 10,000 feet, I prefer to change the layer on the same page rather than having different pages setup)?

and when it does cache data, can we find out how may hours ahead it caches?

Does anyone know these answers for SY Navigator/Oudie N?

Matthew's good experience of cell signal is interesting - one possibility is that when he travels to our countries his phone is roaming and so will pick up any available network, whereas in the home country a phone only picks up the subscribed network.

I run SY Navigator on an Oudie N in which there is a sim - and the device is above the canopy rail. That gets even less signal than my phone. 

[Ramy Yanetz]

I haven’t seen mentioned the recent updates to the skysight caching issue. There were few developments recently which for me completely resolved the issue:

1- recent beta release introduced the cache monitor (a new option under the LXNav Connect  menu). You can now monitor the cache loading in real time  and verify it is fully loaded before taking off.

2- since I can now verify the cache is loaded, I changed my WiFi to ground only to avoid accidentally updating the cache. Not sure if it is necessary but just in case.

3- I found that if I don’t wait until my GPS is locked (by waiting long enough in the altitude confirmation screen for the altitude to show up before confirming) the cache does not get filled. According to LXNav this is due to a bug when the gps internal clock battery is dead, which I suspect may be the case in older units like mine. This bug may or may not been fixed since, but the solution is to simply wait for gps lock (field altitude showing up) before confirming, this should address the caching issue.

Since I started doing all the above, I no longer loosing skysight layers  in flight. 

Ramy

[Steven Wertheimer]

+1, the new weather data cache screen is great. One thing I noticed is that the cache screen is only accessible when you are connected to LXNAV Connect, which makes it somewhat less useful because you can't check it again just before flight after you've turned off your wifi. I asked Uros if they could change that and he said they would make that screen available when offline too. But in any case my weather issues are also completely resolved now.

--

Steve

[Ramy Yanetz]

Steve there is no need to turn off the WiFi. There is an option called something like “ground only” which automatically disconnects the WiFi once you airborn. 

Also I just noticed that the latest GA version has all the recent beta features. 

Ramy

[cdeerinck]

Can anyone tell me where in LX Styler to turn off the "update in flight" option?

I do all my profiles from Styler, and need to turn that off, and I can no longer find it.

[Paul Remde]

Hi,

It's not a Styler setting.  It is a Setup menu setting.  Go to Setup, Hardware, Network, and change the "Wi-Fi state" parameter from ON, to "On ground only" or "Off".

Best Regards,

Pau Remde

[cdeerinck]

Thanks Paul!