You just got a new cellphone equipped with a slick Bluetooth headset. You love the wireless freedom and you idly wonder if the same technology could alleviate the tangle of wires from your portable cockpit gadgets. While you dream of this luxury, you realize that your cellphone headset doesnt always work quite right and you question if Bluetooth in the cockpit is the best idea. Youre right in both views. Bluetooth wireless is one of those great ideas that works we’ll most of the time and can be quite useful, especially with a hands-free cellphone headset. But its tender enough to cause frustration for some users, especially if the equipment isn’t we’ll designed or there’s electromagnetic interference where you happen to be. (These days, that can be everywhere.) Manufacturers of aviation gadgets- GPS and headsets mainly-have been offering Bluetooth options for several years, with mixed success. The technology hasnt exactly taken over the cockpit, but enough buyers have materialized to make a lively market. For this article, we dove into the technical details of the technology and tested a few products which offer it. 
What It Is
At its simplest, Bluetooth is just a wireless networking standard primarily designed for low power and short range to connect a master device with its slaved peripherals or accessories. (See the sidebar on page 17 for a full explanation.)
In a gadget-laden cockpit,there are portable electronic devices where Bluetooth might help: GPS, weather data, traffic, computers and, of course, ANR headsets. All of these require data transmission of some type-either audio streams or digital bits for moving map and other displays-but they also require power. And here, Bluetooth is no help. In fact, thats its biggest drawback. While Bluetooth can alleviate some data cables, unless your gadget can operate on batteries, you still need ships power to run it and that means another cable-the bane of all portable devices.
GPS is DifferentGPS is often self-contained with no external connections beyond the optional separate antenna and Bluetooth isn’t suited to making the antenna wireless, either.
However, self-contained GPS units are really two devices: the GPS receiver itself and the display. GPS receivers have gotten small enough that the entire navigator can be contained in a remote puck antenna-Garmin makes a line of these and another company, Holux, used to supply puck receivers for the first generation of portable datalink.
With the new kits, youre on your own to supply GPS data. But with that taken care of, all thats needed is a computer or display to read the GPS position and velocity output and plot it all on a pretty map. Control Visions Anywhere Map product line is a good example of how all this can be bundled into a relatively user friendly package.
When datalink weather hit the market a few years ago, it first appeared in a