N82 GPS Performance... In an Airplane

    Now you might ask why would somebody sitting in coach on a airplane would want to use their GPS? The only answer i can give is that because it's cool! On my way back from Barcelona, I thought that it would be worth a try to see if I can get a GPS lock in the airplane. The problem is that although on avg. I was 10 Km closer to the satellites, but the metal body of the airplane acted as a barrier at times. However I was able at times to get a lock, and using the default GPS application on the N82 and knowing the coordinates of Los Angeles, I was able to see  how far away I was and get an estimated ETA, which was more interesting to follow than the show they had playing for the flight. The interesting part is that my dedicated Visiontac VPS700 could not lock on at any time, so the N82 did a remarkable job of locking on, without help from AGPS. Here is a video of the whole procedure (also was on the lookout for flight attendants to not bother me thinking my phone was on) and of course in offline mode for safety reasons. The video is taken with my N95-3.

Comments

[Meraj Chhaya]

Sounds fun lol.
Flight attendants and airline companies are a huge issue when it comes to mobile phones, South African Airways doesn't even allow flight mode enabled phones to be left on, it's really stupid.

[Devin Balentina]

I just stupid that they make it such a problem for using phone onboard when in offline mode. They should better educate the flight attendants about this, as most dont seem to have a clue

[Deepak]

I am a flight attendant, and I am well aware of the flight mode in phones these days as I have one too. The thing is, its our airline regulation not to allow any kind of phones to be used on the airplane, even in flight mode. Reason for this being, its very difficult to keep track of all the passengers using their phone onboard these days, which believe me, is a quite a high percentage.