I don’t see any recent posts on Stratux or other viable ADSB in receivers. I’m ditching Foreflight and owing with FltPlanGo. Pireps on your ADSB in unit, cost, where you got it? I’m thinking prebuilt vs building my own Stratux, but I might be able to assemble it. I’m spoiled by 12 hour battery life of my Stratus when I was using Foreflight, so any comments on battery life would also be appreciated.
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I built a stratux years ago and the battery life was decent from what I recall.
The club I flew out of upgraded to having ADSB-in shortly after I built it so I haven’t used the stratux in years.
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Hey John,
We have had one for a few years. Initially we had it powered with a battery pack, but now I’ve got it plugged into a USB power supply that plugs into my cigarette lighter plug. We bought it on Amazon prebuilt. We bought from these guys I think:
We use Avare either on our Android tablet or phones. Works great. Featured in a lot of our videos.
Pirep - works great. I’d like to remote mount the antennas and the GPS somewhere, and hide the white box, but I’ve always had more important projects than that. It just works - traffic and weather.
I use a Levil Astro+ for my ADSB-in, feeding into an Adventure Pilot iFly GPS. The Levil does have and will run off its battery, though I typically have it plugged into a USB port adapter.
Levil has a few “apps” like AHRS and Traffic map available that I can’t comment on as I don’t make use of them.
Bryan
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I use a Stratux and FltPlan Go. Great combo. I built my own, but I’m a nerd like that. It’s mostly plug and play as long as you buy the right hardware. Probably the hardest part is getting the operating system image onto an SD card - and even that isn’t hard if you’ve ever used a Raspberry Pi before.
Bryan Cotton mentioned Avare as an EFB. It’s been a while since I looked at it, but I think that if you add an AHRS sensor to the Stratux, Avare has a gauge set that can pair to it for backup attitude indication. And it also has a synthetic vision module if that’s of interest.
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The stratux works great. If you want to save some money, the kits on Amazon are a good deal.
You just need to add a raspberry pi. I paired mine with a 3b+ which go for about $54 now. Assembly was straightforward, all the sensors are small usb devices that simply plug into the raspberry pi. The radio and gps have antenna wires. The software is on an included SD card, you just put it in the raspberry pi’s card slot and turn the device on.
The cost savings for just plugging a few things into a tiny computer and turning it on are significant.
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One thing about the Stratux where I mounted it is that the antennas are sort of floppy. Because of limited clearance to the windshield, I angled one forward and one back. Turbulence, hard landings, bumps, and loops would sometimes knock them down. I tie-wrapped them together and they have been good since.
I used to have a Stratux that I got on eBay when I was flying a rental Piper. It worked well. It didn’t have a battery so I just used a Milwaukee M12 light with that had a USB port in my flight bag with a USB cord to the Stratux suction cupped on the rear window. Battery life wasn’t an issue but wasn’t flying long enough though the tool batteries can last pretty long.
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