Flying Into Oshkosh With The $199 ForeFlight Scout

I got the little Scout unit the day before I left for AirVenture in my 182. I had ForeFlight already loaded on my large-display iPhone 7-Plus, and the phone made the wifi connection right off the bat. Scout is tiny, only the size of a largish USB thumb drive, and you can position it anywhere you'd like using the cute little suction cups that come with the unit. I put it on the windscreen out of my line of sight. There's no battery in the Scout unit, so you need to run a micro USB cable to the bottom of the receiver and then plug it in to some USB port. I had an external USB battery handy, so I plugged Scout into that and just put the battery in the sidewall pocket and forgot about it. It's a pretty big battery and the Scout draws very little current!I was guessing I had about a week's worth of charge available, and I'm not kidding.

For those of you who haven't survived the procedure themselves, the arrival from the south funnels roughly four out of every five aircraft arriving at KOSH though a single feeder lane, to RIPON intersection, then to Fisk and then off to one of four runway ends, 36, 18, 27 or 9, depending on which way the wind is blowing.

Soon after I took off from San Marcos, where I keep my Skylane, I started picking up returns. In addition to lacking a battery, Scout is also missing a GPS receiver. It's strictly an ADS-B receiver. There's no attitude indicator to drive the synthetic vision in ForeFlight, and there's certainly no Sirius XM Aviation Weather either. It is a barebones unit. But how useful is it.

Despite its lean design, I found that Scout was great at doing the two things it does do: Showing traffic and showing weather. I don't have a theory for why it is, but Scout was tenacious at locking on to a tower's signal and not letting go. There's no display of any kind on Scout, just a power supplied indicator light, so you control it though your device on ForeFlight.

I did run into one problem on a few occasions, one that can happen on any portable ADS-B receiver from any brand but that might rightfully concern pilots: I saw a phantom airplane, at or very close to me in altitude and very close behind me. I guessed and was right that there was no second airplane there---I was talking with ATC the whole time and they never said a word. Not only that, but when I queried them about the return, the controller nicely told me that he only saw my return. Because my plane is not YET equipped with ADS-B Out, I was seeing my plane's Mode-C return rebroadcast up to me through the TIS-B traffic system and displayed back to me via Scout on my ForeFlight app. One clue to what was going on was that there was no ADS-B information on the aircraft symbol and the plane was never in front of me; it's distance behind me was apparently a function of the latency of the system. Still, it was disconcerting. And ForeFlight says that it's working to cut down on such ghosting issues on the Scout's software.

Looking ahead to the Ripon Arrival, even when it was still a hundred miles ahead, I could see traffic, and lots of it. So thick were the targets as I got closer that it soon dawned on me that I would have to disable traffic in order to see map data,such as waypoint names and geographical features. But Scout was picking up so many targets even in this over-busy environment it was clear that it was up for any challenge.

Weather, while not an issue on my arrival, was still very useful, as the forecast had been for storms. They stayed well east of Lake Michigan as it turned out, so I had great weather for the arrival.

Scout couldn't help in any way with my dealing with the slow flight demonstration that the pilot in the Citabria in front of me was putting on. But it did make me grateful that I did indeed have all that traffic information. And if I hope that next time I have a lot less traffic information it's only because I hope that next time there will be a lot less traffic.

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