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Contributor Al Pavangkanan lives in Los Angeles. Al is found on many mobile message boards as Dr Tran or Doc Tran. Follow me on twitter!, Check out my flickr

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Nokia N82 Using Sportstracker At 10000 Meters Altitude

June 13th, 2008 • Al Pavangkanan • Filed Under •

I recently flew home from Houston to Los Angeles. I got myself a window seat during check in. I was pleased to find my seat had two windows. Inspired by a post by Monadi at Phone-rush, I wanted to try GPS in mid-flight for myself.

Before takeoff, I set the Nokia N82 to offline mode and then turned it off. When the pilot started talking, I first turned on my Nokia N95. It took a few minutes to get a GPS lock. I couldn’t move it around without losing the signal.

I turned the Nokia N82 on and it didn’t take long for it to get a signal. I turned on the GPS data application and got this screenshot:

Nokia N82 at high altitude

Taking a cue from the great position artist Stavros, I turned on the Sportstracker application to make some of my own position art.

I first changed a few settings. I set the units to imperial and the GPS filtering to low. I was able to keep the Nokia N82 in my shirt pocket and maintain a signal lock. I then activated the Sportstracker. Here is a map of my position art:

View Larger Map

One giant stroke across the American Southwest.

This is a detailed log of the journey at the sportstracker website. You can see some screenshots and a few pictures I took while in midflight.

It looks like I started Sportstracker at the end of the ascent portion of the flight at almost 11000 meters (36000 feet) and a speed of 846 km/hr (536 mi/hr). It began to slow down and descend quickly somewhere over San Bernadino. I turned it off as soon as the pilot said to turn off all electronic devices.

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Mike M

Great article Al.

onlife

Well, as long as they don't realize what you're doing, nobody cares anyway. And if they do, I don't mind to discuss - usually they give it up after a short discussion. Over here, you can only be jailed if you committed a crime, not if you just don't play by the civil rules of a civil company ...

Al Pavangkanan

@onlife

I'd have loved to keep it on the entire trip. Wrong or not, the fear of being fined or jailed makes me behave and obey.

David Mc Nally

@onlife: I believe one of the reasons for this is safety. Takeoff and landing is the part of a flight with the biggest risk of bad stuff happening, and you don't want 200 passengers with their iPods plugged in when you try to tell them to duck and grab their ankles.

dimitris

Radio receivers also emit, or "leak", radio frequencies. So your GPS chip was likely emitting a - very low - signal. Since the frequency depends on the receiver architecture, there's no way to conclusively know that *all* receivers are safe to use in aircraft. That's the reason for the blanket prohibition of transmitters *and* receivers.

As to the EU regulation, if I remember correctly it is only supposed to be used with microcells installed on the plane which signal the mobile to transmit at its lowest setting. Plus, the frequencies are known/tested with the relevant avionics before they are allowed to be used on board.

So, Al, technically speaking, the Feds might want to have a word with you (not that I'd expect that to happen).

onlife

You seriously turned it off when the pilot said to turn off all electronic devices? Oh, you Americans are such slaves to authorities, even when they're wrong ... Over here in Europe, nobody cares for what the crew says about electronic devices. We just use them, 'cause we know it don't bother the plane. For example, what should a GPS-receiving device with flight mode on ever harm? Even the plane you were sitting in receives GPS signals, so what?

The European Union recently even cleared the way for normal mobile phone usage in planes, e.g. data and calls. If you want to see a lot of flights on sportstracker, set the workout type to flying and search for everybody, you'll find a whole lot of people doing this from start to landing :-)

Jay

I tried the same thing with my N82 during the flight from Madrid to NY. It seemed that whenever the plane changes altitude the connection gets lost and that the best thing about it is taking pictures and geotagging them, also it's nice to see the planes speed and aprroximate time till destination on your N82 (assumming you geotagged JFK's location.
Here is one example of my geotagged in-flight picture: http://pt-br.zooomr.com/photos/a1745/4660142/.