Flying to Montana with the handheld GPS

As my wife and I were flying (commercially) to MT for a much delayed honeymoon I hooked up my portable GPS receiver to follow our progress.

We flew Northwest, and they allow the use of the GPS in cruise (thankfully they understand it is about as harmful as a digital wristwatch to the aircraft).

I stuck the remote antennae up to the window (I couldn't get much of a signal with the built-in one) and watched the satellite signals come in.

It wasn't as cool to watch the progress as I imagined it would be - I am a big fan of situational awareness (yeah, I know how massively geeky that sounds) but what it showed wasn't all that surprising. We took a bit of a circuitous route, though I doubt it added more than 10 minutes to the trip time. In fact, we didn't go direct (RIC->MSP) until about halfway through the trip.

I spent time trying to ID towns we went over and trying to improve my distance estimations, but we didn't fly over many landmarks that existed on the GPS - mostly very small towns.

We flew at an altitude of 31500' (+-200') and the max groundspeed was 530 MPH. That's a little faster than my GPS normally sees. :)

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