Skydemon is indeed the dominant satnav product but it should be noted that others were there long before.
Notably PocketFMS (started c. 2003, later to become EasyVFR) was there many years before, as a noncommercial community project, which moved to a paid model only when the world’s CAAs shafted the US over copyright into stopping publishing the aviation data which they supplied to the US 
EasyVFR is still going well (I use it within the UK; abroad I tend to go IFR).
When I started doing my PPL in year 2000, there was a variety of products, including Peter Mundy’s Navbox which I used for many years, until its demise in 2016.
IMHO, what really drove “satnav” into GA flying over the past decade has been the explosion of social media coverage, and for various reasons SD got the bulk of that. Those who wanted “satnav” could have always had it, ever since GPS became available. Today, social media determines so much of what succeeds and what doesn’t. Of course hardware has also improved, once the truly horrible Pocket/PC was consigned to oblivion by IOS and Android
The SkyDemon is under my radar recently. I have been planning to buy an application to make VFR plans, but the most of the apps are not promising to work with all layers and features in my country, Turkey. I sent a request to a SkyDemon team and the answer was yes , Thanks GOD. I will use it from FERRY flight from Germany to Turkey and thereafter in Turkey. Any experience here, any advice? Which combination works without problems. Tablet , WAAS Bluetooth GPS ?
Thanks a lot and safe landings.
I have a Samsung XCover 4 which I basically clip to the top of the instrument panel above the ASI for Skydemon, it works really well – it’s big enough that the vertical ‘radar’ view shows in portrait orientation, but not so big it’s blocking any of the windscreen. It’s also connected to the audio aux in, so alerts etc. are heard in the headsets. Basically I run Skydemon even for local flights like towing gliders because it’s an easy way to log the flight times. (All I need to do now is write a program to parse the CSV output and generate logbook pages for the airframe and engine log books…)
Peter wrote:
Those who wanted “satnav” could have always had it, ever since GPS became available.
Yeah, sure, but at what cost. EasyVFR, SkyDemon and others have put GPS navigation within the reach of everybody.
MedEwok wrote:
Anyone got a hint for me which device (no Apple products!!!) to best run it on? My Galaxy S8 seems a tad small, display wise, for this job…
Hi, I’m using a 10" Samsung tablet for primary EFB/Nav and Galaxy Note phone (6"+) for backup EFB/Nav.
It is not perfect, but it is a great tool. I will offer a subscription to my dad for Christmas. I feel SD does the best possible job in the current european VFR mess (different weather charts, different FPL management, etc…).
I hope they will not be beaten by FF (a great peoduct still) or another non-european solution.
It is the only EFB I used, but I did a long trip with 2 other pilots, one using EVFR, the other Jeppesen. And we concluded that SD was probably the best app, the others doing the job too.
My friend who is a long time user of EVFR says it seems to be slowly dying (his feeling).
Yes Medewok, it will make you more comfortable traveling, especially in foreign countries.
Peter wrote:
Those who wanted “satnav” could have always had it, ever since GPS became available.
Yep, I was using a GPS 196 from about 2003 and although it was limited, it still put me in a different world for flying around my area’s complex airspace. Today the vast amount of periodically updated data automatically provided through the software (in the US predominantly ForeFlight) is again different. Most recently, inexpensive ADS-B boxes that automatically Wi-Fi to the tablet and GPS software, providing full time traffic and weather in the US are transformational, at a cost that even a starving student renting a $20K C150 buys without thought. In 2003 you couldn’t have bought similar GPS capability for the price of the whole plane! The utility hinges on all of it being dirt cheap, ridiculously easy to configure and use, and available to all.
The only flying that I’d do today without a tablet and aeronautical GPS (usually two including my phone which fully replicates the tablet) is pattern/circuit work. For long flights I have triple redundancy with an old iPad in the cockpit as well as the phone in my pocket and the primary tablet powered and semi-permanently mounted directly in my field of view. Two of my three have a redundant GPS position source, primary GPS and traffic/weather via Wi-Fi from the Stratus ADS-B receiver (also semi-permanently mounted and powered on with the avionics master) plus backup via the internal GPSs. All this is very different than my world of 2003!
I suffered from a similar phobia until I bought my first iPad (in order to run Garmin Pilot). Now I’m about to buy my fifth… So I have to ask, why no Apples?Anyone got a hint for me which device (no Apple products!!!) to best run it on?
Yeah, sure, but at what cost. EasyVFR, SkyDemon and others have put GPS navigation within the reach of everybody.
Navbox was doing that before any of those, I believe, and you could plan a flight and load the route into a handheld GPS, which is all that anybody actually needs.
The more modern products are better for a non-preplanned flight, with airspace warnings etc. That’s really dangerous to do in the UK now, unless you totally trust hearing the airspace warnings during flight.
So funnily enough, as someone who has been hacking around Europe VFR, all the way down to Crete in 2004, I am not really decided whether as much progress has been made as people think. We certainly have great tools for knowing where we are but we’ve had that ever since we have had moving map boxes with a really rock solid GPS receiver (basically the Garmin handhelds, 196 onwards, so year 2000 or so?). The more recent developments have been in packing loads of functionality (which I know from flying with many users, confuses many users) and the occassional useful thing like airspace warnings. Perhaps the biggest real gain has been in “convergence” i.e. bundling in wx, notams, and FP filing. We also have much better map coverage but the vast vast majority of VFR pilots never make use of that (it merely opens up the market for the software into different cultures in Europe).
The battery life of tablets is rubbish compared to the dedicated handheld GPSs. They are also much less rugged, and the touch screens are prone to accidental screwups unless they can be disabled.
In the end, convergence wins every time, which is why people pay 1k+ for a phone with a reasonable camera and enough flash to store every picture and every movie they ever took and every song they ever heard of
Jacko wrote:
I suffered from a similar phobia until I bought my first iPad (in order to run Garmin Pilot). Now I’m about to buy my fifth… So I have to ask, why no Apples?
There is an objective and a subjective answer to this question, but the emotional aspect is that I have a deep seated hatred for this company. I also think their products are overpriced and perform worse than cheaper competitors. Most people who are big fans of Apple also seem to be idiots who favour style over substance.
FYI I am not a big fan of Samsung either, despite only having had Samsung smart phones so far. I really liked my Nokia 6300, which was my last “dumb” phone and a very good one at that (it still works flawlessly, I recently checked it). Unfortunately Nokia missed the whole “smart” phone train and as a result of too little competition, the entire smartphone “ecosystem” is really sh1t, limiting the user as much as possible and trying to milk them as much as possible.
Before smartphones were a thing, Microsoft was often maligned as an evil company trying to rule everything, but they never ever constricted their users nearly as much as Apple and Android do…
