External GPS units
External GPS units, which are generally connected to your device by Bluetooth, will almost certainly work as a source of position information. The connection to external GPS units is managed by the operating system (iOS) rather than by AvPlan. Hence if a device is said by the manufacturer to be compatible with iOS, then it should work. All you have to do is make the bluetooth connection. The device will then become the default source of GPS position data for your iPad or iPhone.
A Note on tethering non-GPS (WiFi only) iPads to iPhones
iPhone to iPad tethering will not provide an iPad with GPS position.
AvPlan works by requesting the operating system on your iPad to provide location services; a GPS-enabled iPad will return an accurate location when requested. However, if the iPad decides that the location information it is receiving is not of sufficient quality (because it cant see enough GPS satellites, for example), it will not pass location data to AvPlan, or to any other app.
When location data is being provided by a GPS inside the iPad, this signal will generally be of high quality and will will be rapidly updated. But, when you are tethering to a phone, location information provided by the phone is only sent sporadically in between all the other tasks happening on the iphone and iPad (like sharing the internet). The data signal is consequently poor and generally insufficient to provide a continuous location data to the iPad.
It can therefore appear that tethering for a location signal is working. Bit it It won’t work for long, and the transfer of location data will typically fail more often than it succeeds, especially when you start moving! Hence tethered location data is simply not accurate enough to be useable.
If you have a WiFi only iPad, then to get a GPS location you will need a dedicated external GPS receiver to connect to your iPad. A number of these are listed on the AvPlan-EFB website noted at the top of this section.
Also note that the external GPS must be talking directly to the iPad. Connecting it to a tethered iPhone will not solve the above problem.
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