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Can you download zoomed-out maps of the flight you're on? I always like to try to put the phone up against the window to see where you actually are (the maps on
by kylehotchkiss 3y ago
Can you download zoomed-out maps of the flight you're on? I always like to try to put the phone up against the window to see where you actually are (the maps on airplanes IFE are comically out of scale and hard to read with a 4inch poorly rotating airplane icon overlaid on them)
- dan-robertson 3y agoI don’t know about the receivers in phones but my understanding of gps is that it’s actually very slow to initialise if you don’t already have a rough idea of where you are. Roughly, I think you try to guess where you are and do some dsp work that will successfully separate signal from noise if you guessed correctly. You do this first for the ‘coarse navigation signal’ and again for the fine one. I think there are ways to improve it, eg testing multiple locations in parallel but I don’t know how much phones do those vs having good guesses (nearby cell towers, Wi-Fi, flights in your calendar can all be relevant signals to start with good guesses).
- robbiep 3y agoI generally don’t have any problem doing this on Google maps on my domestic Australian flights, in fact I almost always do it - great to see what’s underneath me and just how fucking much nothing there is. Although the Qantas map when I’m flying on a plane with IFE does a pretty good job as well