Stratux!

I've always been a bit of a hardware geek.  I've got Arduino's sitting around and more half finished technical projects than I care to admit.  When I saw that someone had basically hacked together a DIY portable ADS-B receiver I figured it was probably a kludgey diversion, wouldn't work well and would take eons to setup and get going.  Man was I wrong!  I finally succumbed to temptation and bought the shopping list from this Reddit thread:

After no more than 10 minutes of unpackaging an Amazon.com box and snapping together the parts I had an ADS-B receiver on my counter.  A simple upload of the Stratux OS took about 3 minutes, and boom she was alive.

This morning I took up the Baron into 30 kt headwinds and tried her out.  To my amazement, my iPad connected to the Statux right away, picked up 2 ADS-B towers, and started uplinking traffic and weather!  All for $113.  Similar devices cost 600-1500 and this one works perfectly.

I've got traffic and weather in the Baron already, and truth be told the ADS-B traffic is nowhere near as good as my GTS-800 active traffic radar system, and the weather isn't as good as XM from my GDL-69A, but hey this was a hundred bucks.  Also I don't have traffic or weather in my Citabria and now I do!

Here you can see plenty of targets, but until everyone is equipped with ADS-B out it's a limited subset of the actual traffic.  Weather came in great and I was able to get nexrad radar returns and airport weather no problem as well as winds aloft.  Pretty stoked on this little gem, now I just need to 3D print a case for it.

Flight training

Looks like I made the newsletter for TakeFlight San Diego.

I'm famous!  haha...  lately I've been instructing a lot.  I currently have 3 private students and 2 sport pilot students and also doing flight reviews and aircraft checkouts, IPC's etc.  Hey wait a sec, this is starting to sound like a job, which I was trying to avoid.  Hmmm...  it's good fun though.  I get paid to fly around all day and show people how to fly airplanes!