Respecting the wish to not overload servers/performance of the Beta APP, i currently only have 4 or 5 countries selected (agreed, some bigger ones like germany and france).
Thinking ahead, i will want to basically have all of Europe and even USA/Caribbean enabled for aerodata (when on holidays, when on airline flights once they are back, being able to measure distance, time to go etc...)
But already now with the 4 or 5 countries, i'm running low on space due to approach plates / synchronizing takes a lot of time.
In my opinion it is important that in the future we get the possibility to select the approach plate download/sync per country separately from the country picker for the aerodata.
Let's say i will plan a trip to Croatia, no need to update approach plates for Norway then. Nonetheless, i may be planning a rough flightplan for a flight to Norway eventually, while sitting in a hotel in Croatia without a need for update approach plates (of Norway).
And if i just want to do a latest quick navdata update on a poor hotel wifi, i don't want to wait for all of european plates to sync, yet croatia, slovenia, austria, italia and switzerland i will definitely want to have updated with the latest as they will be relevant.
please consider that in the roadmap. my S2 tablet is already running low on space.
another thing to consider is giving more control to where the plates are stored (external SD card for instance).
That is already inplemented?! AFIK when you add a country EV will not download all plates for that added country unless you manually instruct it to do so using menu->downloads menu-> airport plates.
Its not wise to permanently keep a lot of countries you dont need now activated in EV4 because it not only costs storage space, but also processing things like wx and notams will be unnessesary consuming performance, don’t underestimate that effect.
Now a days internet access is so common, adding a country when you need it is just a matter of a minute mostly.
taking 5 minutes, that's simply not true. for navdata yes, but not for plates! they take significantly longer to download.
waited several hours yesterday when i updated the mappc (at home using the fast and wired connection!) downloading the plates for france, germany, switzerland, austria and italy. (6gb) also not sure the german and swiss plates were loaded as i updated the outdated subscription only afterwards.
that is maybe 50% of the navdata set i should really have permanently in storage (and was able to have with EV3 and previous). Norway to Portugal to Greece essentially. doing what-if planning, searching for navdata etc...
if i add a country, i get the navdata immediately. but i'm unable to exclude the plates, so next time i press "download plates", that country is automatically added/included. as a result the plates always "lag behind" but eventually include everything.
but I will simply need/want all of that navdata coverage, also for planning purposes and the search dialog results. In fact EV3 even mostly had my vacation spots overseas, too. But at the same time i do not need all the plates to have with me all the time. That can be done more specifically to an actual trip (and that saves a lot of storage space and download bandwith).
On the other hand there are essential countries like germany and switzerland where i will want my plates to be always up to date and stored permanently.
from my experience, adding new countries will automatically trigger a fresh download of WX and Notam, even if these are set to manual. The plates are not downloaded, if previously paused, but something like a plate catalogue download is triggered. This is a nice feature, but the text is misleading. It says “preparing to download “ which is not really happening.
What I am missing, just like Bernhard, is a European aerodata, like we had with EV3. This must not include a detailed map, or plates or elevation. Only airports and airspaces for the whole of Europe. That would make planning and playing more fun. I am often wondering how many small airports exist around a major town, on an island, or near any POI. However, I don’t want to load the whole country (possibly through the mobile network) just to see this information.
taking 5 minutes, that's simply not true. for navdata yes, but not for plates! they take significantly longer to download.
That is why plates are not automatically downloaded! You must have initiated the plates download yourself.
What I am missing, just like Bernhard, is a European aerodata, like we had with EV3
One of most given reasons by EV3 trial users in the past is not beeing able to selected just a hand full of countries. They often felt an entire continent was way too much for them, and caused (rightfully) too much performance stress on their devices. Also often we had cases where certain countries just where not included in the dataset.
For this reason we switched to a per-country dataset in EV4, what also created new oppertunities for more detailed data like expanding WX to FL160, detailed cloud coverage per wind aloft layer, parsing NOTAMS for airspace activations/deactivations etc.
If we would do an "AeroData only" regional coverage (european, worldwide maybe even) where the user would have to select and keep track of what data to keep updated and what not would be way to complex for 95% of the users. I do understand power users like Bernie and Leif can perfectly handle this but you are not representative for our avarage userbase.
IMHO if a user has selected a country, he should not constantly have to worry in the back of his mind that WX, NOTAMS, terrain, plates or whatever are installed or not.
I understand the country approach for an actual flight. A VFR pilot will normally not fly across the whole of Europe, but stay in one or two countries in a trip. Wx, Notams and terrain are needed for that flight.
But in order to plan or dream a future trip to a distant place I am not looking for detailed data. The question is: is it possible?
I assume that the “performance stress on devices” is caused by detailed maps and advanced 3D Wx. Not through basic data. Even today EV4 is maintaining a nearly worldwide (!) airspace database, which does not seem to affect it much.
rope, but stay in one or two countries in a trip. Wx, Notams and terrain are needed for that flight.
But in order to plan or dream a future trip to a distant place I am not looking for detailed data. The question is: is it possible?
But wouldn't you need data like terrain and NOTAMS too to plan such future trip?
I assume that the “performance stress on devices” is caused by detailed maps and advanced 3D Wx. Not through basic data. Even today EV4 is maintaining a nearly worldwide (!) airspace database, which does not seem to affect it much.
Detailed maps (the geodata layers) have hardly any influence on the mapping engine. The performance stress is mostly caused by Aviation related data decluttering : for example WX on the map is an extremely CPU and storage intensive proces to get the WX depiction "just right". Remember in the beginning we had discussions like "those cloudsymbols should be a bit bigger" or "those sigwx symbols should be less scattered"? This declutting of WX data has a significant impact on pan & zoom speed.
Same goes for NOTAMS : More and more airspaces are "activated by NOTAM", so EV4 has for each airspace it newly renders to check if there is a NOTAM that maybe activates or deactivates it. Countries can have hundreds of NOTAMS, so the more countries selected, the more NOTAMS have to get evaluated to see if they effect the visual appearance of an airspace. This also has a significant impact on rendering speed after map pan or zoom. BTW, this would be less if Airspaces would be per-country also. In essense we should do this, to be consistent with a "per country" approach. But its a very difficult thing to do; some airspaces overlap country borders and we couldn't guarantee a 100% perfect airspace database when we initially tried to deliver this "per country", so we decided to put airspaces in at a worldwide level to avoid any risk of an airspace not beeing included. Negative effect of this was an increase in airspacelabelling declutter time, but we just didn't want to run the risk to not render important airspaces.
Last but not least, the AeroData decluttering and labeling also has a significant impact on map pan&zoom speed. This decluttering of AeroData is extremely complex, full of rules developed over time to get the best compromise between "too much" and "too little" symbols on the map.
Leif expressed the wish sometime ago that AeroData could maybe also be worldwide, just as airspaces are. I tried that, but we ended up with a 275MB datafile that needs to get downloaded with every aerodata database update, which I fear many users will find too large and too timeconsuming because they are only onterested in one or two countries. But such a large database will also have enormous impact on the AeroData decluttering mentioned above. Only a switch to "brainless" aerodata filtering could speed that up, or decluttering information should be embedded in the datafile somehow so EV4 doesn't have to do the complex math anymore. This is a possible road to go, even when keeping the per-country approach, but its a lot of workand up to now we decided to spend time on other subjects.
But wouldn't you need data like terrain and NOTAMS too to plan such future trip?
No, because Notams are probably out of date by the time of the actual flightplaning. (By that time as many countries as it takes will be downloaded )