PilotGEEK Blog

Get PilotGEEK for your Blackberry!

Love your Blackberry?

Do you make fun of all your friends who jump into the latest Droid or iPad or iPhone or whatever expensive toy is on the market today?

(Especially since people tend to carry more than one of them – one for email, one as a phone, one for flight charts, etc.?)

Get PilotGEEK for your Blackberry and keep the best of all worlds.  Use the browser on your Blackberry to access weather, flight charts, etc., and get texts or emails of alerts for any airport you set up.

Click the link and follow the instructions below to configure your cell phone for your 30-day free trail.

PilotGEEK My Blackberry! 30 Day Free Trial

You can use PilotGEEK on your Blackberry!

You don’t have to have an iPhone to have access to a great pre-flight briefer and in-flight alerts.

Using PilotGEEK on your Blackberry, you’ll get

• Cell phone web access to the PilotGEEK route briefer.   The cell phone route briefer provides you with similar capability as the Free Briefer; providing TFRs, up to 10 METAR and TAF reports along a route, static weather radar centered around each METAR reporting station, FSS and ASOS phone numbers and origination and destination airport NOTAMs.  Cell phone web access requires your cell telephone to be web enabled.
• Text message interface to PilotGEEK cell briefer.  The text message interface allows you to send a text message to one of 6 addresses and receive a METAR, TAF, TFR, Winds Aloft, ASOS or local FSS phone number as a reply.
• Event notification text messages which enable the PilotGEEK system to send you a text message when weather or TFR conditions change at one any of 5 user specified airports.
• Immediate Access You could have your first briefing within 5 minutes!

Click the link and follow the instructions below to configure your Droid for your 30-day free trail.

PilotGEEK My Droid! 30 Day Free Trial

If you're a pilot, and you have a Droid©, check this out!

If you’re a pilot, and you have a Droid©, you should know that PilotGEEK works perfectly – especially since you have a nice big screen. PilotGEEK has always been a browser-based application, and has been around for years – the phones are finally catching up to where the keyboards and screens are big enough to really enjoy the capabilities!

When you sign up for a 30 day free trial, you’ll get a series of tutorials showing you how PilotGEEK on your Droid can do you preflight briefings, find you the lowest fuel prices along your route, and give you airport information. You can set it up to send you alerts for weather changes or pop-up TFRs  during your cross country.

You’ll find that your Droid makes  a pretty darn good co-pilot!

But you won’t get it from the Droid Apps Market, you can only get it from the PilotGEEK site.

Click the link and follow  the instructions below to configure your Droid for your 30-day free trail.

PilotGEEK My Droid! 30 Day Free Trial

The other day one of my subscribers, Mike, asked if there were anyway he could get decoded text messages – the only problem his cell provider was NEXTEL now a Sprint service that doesn’t support MMS messaging.  Well working with him and researching the options, I confirmed there is currently no way to deliver an MMS message directly to a Sprint/NEXTEL cell phone.

At that point, Mike asked if I could just send the decoded message to his registered email account, since he got email on his Blackberry.

So I put in a quick hack to force an email response whenever Mike sent a text message request.

It was the same day that I received a bill for my company provided Blackberry.  Being a corporate phone, text and MMS messages were charged for each sent or received.

To say a light went on is an understatement! And now you can take advantage of the solution.

To use the email interface, just send the same text message style request from your registered email address.  The PilotGEEK service will send the response, encoded or decoded based upon your text message configuration setting, back to your email address.  Just like the MMS interface, all of the responses will be included in a single response.

To remind you, to use PilotGEEK’s text message interface, just send a text message or now an email from your registered email address, to txt@pilotgeek.com.  The first line of the message should look like:

AirportID req1 req2

where req1, req2 can be:

A – asos

M – metar

TA -taf

TF – tfr

W – wa

R – radar

L – Loop Radar

You can put as many requests in the first line as you’d like and you can just use the unique part of the request or the complete word, so M, ME, met and metar will all return the metar data.

I hope you find the enhanced feature useful.  Remember many of the new features come from you, the subscribers.

Safe Flying.

Tom Nery

Manager

PilotGEEK, LLC

PilotGEEK My Phone! 30 Day Free Trial

Are those clouds coming in?

It was a beautiful day for a motorcycle ride!

At least it had started out that way.

A friend had told us about a “poker run” style charity motorcycle ride for the Children’s Justice Center in Ogden, Utah.

It was an absolutely gorgeous ride around small towns near Ogden, with several stops along the way. For people not familiar with “poker runs,” the idea is that each motorcyclist or team picks up a poker card in a sealed envelope at each of five different locations (usually restaurants, local churches or parks) and then turns in all five cards at the end. The team with the highest poker hand comprised of these cards wins a prize of some kind. And of course the real incentive is the ride, and the food, which is mandatory for a charity event involving motorcycles.

We had a wonderful time, it was a beautiful day. The shade from the steep mountain canyons kept it from being too hot, the leaves were beginning to turn, and it’s impossible to describe the smell of mountain pines and the echoing rumble of hundreds of motorcycle engines as we traveled through them in a courteously ordered chaos.

While we were enjoying the lunch they served after the ride at Kelly’s Road House in Morgan, my cell phone beeped  with an incoming text.   I was surprised, because it was a Saturday morning, so curious, I pulled it out and looked.

I had been flying the week before, so I had PilotGEEK alerts set up on my phone and I hadn’t turned them off.

The text was a weather alert, indicating that conditions were no longer VFR at KTVY, the airport nearest our home.   Which was strange, because the weather was beautiful in Morgan.

If you’re familiar with the climate in Utah, you are shaking your head as you read this because you realize this is not really all that strange. The arrangement of the mountains and canyons often create wildly different weather patterns on the ground within 30 miles of each other.

Having been alerted, we used the PilotGEEK software to check the weather on my Blackberry while we were still warm and dry in the restaurant.  We  changed our plans to delay in Salt Lake City and run some errands, see a movie and then have dinner before heading home.

By the time we arrived in Tooele, Utah, the storm was long over, the road was dry, and so were we.

I’m leaving my weather alerts on all the time now. It’s fun to know what’s going on with the weather,  even if I’m not flying that day.

PilotGEEK My Phone! 30 Day Free Trial

Why a 30-Day Free Trial?

I’m asked a lot, especially from business people, why I offer a 30-day trial.  Given the price of $24.99 per year, they speculate, pilots would be willing to sign up for the service and if they found it wasn’t valuable would just let their first subscription expire.  Net result, I would have made money from pilots that will never subscribe.

While from a business stand point, I can see why they might think this an good business plan.  But as a pilot I realize a few things:

1. Flying is already expensive enough. Whether you rent or own no one has the spare cash to throw at things they may not need.
2. After a 30-day trial it is very unlikely that a user will want a refund. In fact in three years, not a single refund has been requested.  This makes my business life much similar.
3. I, personally, like the whole “try-before-you-buy” mentality.  I flew my plane and had it inspected before I bought it so why would I not want a similar option for cell phone weather briefing products.
4. Pilots are members of a small community that talks and a few people that may not have need for the service can really hurt future business.

I think my subscribers agree with this philosophy and I’m very happy with the results.  About 50% of those pilots signing up for a free trial convert to a year’s subscription and about 90% of my subscribers renew.  Also since it was first released, about 3 years ago the number of paying subscribers doubled the first two years and tripled last year – all with negligible advertising confirming that a good product and a reasonable price will sell via good word-of-mouth recommendations from satisfied users.

So that is why I offer the 30-day trial.

Any questions???

Tom

PilotGEEK My Phone! 30 Day Free Trial

Have a cell phone, Blackberry, Palm or TREO  that is web enabled or has text messaging? PilotGEEK can be used with ANY web or text enabled cell phone!

So, you can get route briefings with radar, TFR info, winds aloft and more are only $24.99 a year.

And we offer a 30 day free trial.

Why do we offer a 30 day free trial?

How do you know if the PilotGEEK Cell Phone Briefer is a “must have” unless you have the chance to try it yourself, on your own phone.  We couldn’t agree with you more!

We’re making it easy to judge for yourself by offering a FREE 30 day trail.

PilotGEEK My Phone! 30 Day Free Trial

PilotGEEK provides the information pilots need, whenever and wherever they need it.

Features and Plans

Free Briefer

The free briefer provides weather and safety information along a route.  By specifying an origination and destination airport, the free briefer calculates a great circle route and provides METAR and TAF data for airports along the route based upon your requested route width as well as trip distance and initial course.  Additionally, you receive notification of TFRs that may be present in the vicinity of flight, NOTAMs for the origination and destination airports as well as a radar loop for the origination airport.  By clicking on the radar, you can scroll the radar‘s view to view weather in other areas.

The free briefer is free of charge.

Trial Briefer

The trial briefer provides you with 30 days of access to the cell briefer functionality, including:

• Cell phone web access to the PilotGEEK route briefer.   The cell phone route briefer provides you with similar capability as the Free Briefer; providing TFRs, up to 10 METAR and TAF reports along a route, static weather radar centered around each METAR reporting station, FSS and ASOS phone numbers and origination and destination airport NOTAMs.  Cell phone web access requires your cell telephone to be web enabled.
• Text message interface to PilotGEEK cell briefer.  The text message interface allows you to send a text message to one of 6 addresses and receive a METAR, TAF, TFR, Winds Aloft, ASOS or local FSS phone number as a reply.
• Event notification text messages which enable the PilotGEEK system to send you a text message when weather or TFR conditions change at one any of 5 user specified airports.

The Trial Briefer is free for the trial period.  You will receive no more than 5 reminders during the 30 day period indicating your trial will be expiring.

Cell Briefer Monthly

The cell briefer monthly lets you utilize all of the trial cell briefer features for 30 days once the trial briefer period expires.

The cell briefer monthly costs just $2.99 per month.

Cell Briefer Yearly

The cell briefer yearly lets you utilize all of the cell briefer features for a full year once the trial briefer period expires.

The cell briefer yearly is only $24.99 per year – - – that’s 30% off the Cell Briefer Monthly price and the best value.

Try it Today!