Let me clarify my position here so you can understand where I am comming from. I live and do most of my flying in Florida. It's flat. 99% of the time, I use no electronic navigation....I use a chart. To me, it's simple, fun, and enjoyable. As with any pilot I know, I always know where I am at, which means I know where the nearest field is at, including farm fields. I have had two engine-outs in my lifetime. One time I made it to a field, the other I made it to a cow pasture. I count myself as lucky. You carry a laptop to store trending engine parameters. I understand your point. To me, that's just a tad bit to analytical and removes the fun of flying for me. In my years of experience building engines, I always used parameter storing devices on eveything we raced...just not what I played with for fun. Example: Motorcycles carried tire temp sensors, wheel speed sensors (coupled with tachometer readings used to determine wheel spin at differeing rpms), egt, o'2, map, tps, head temp, oil temp and pressure, ....stored in a box and downloaded later. We raced, hence we over-analyzed looking for every second of lap time we could conjure up. But that's racing, and to do that in my flying machine just removes the fun from it, for me. You look at it differently. So, to sum this up...I like to keep it as simple as possible. When I get into the rental flyer, armed with the weather report and a $100 hamburger destination, after a thorough preflight, I sprawl out the chart on my lap and away I go...happy as pig in a poke.
With that said, the map unit you showed us was neat...but far too complicated for my simple tastes. However....looks like a nice unit. But instead of that, I would consider a map that runs entirely on my laptop, coupled to a GPS unit. Go look inside a police car and check out the laptop mounting systems they use in the car. They are quite simple, and could easily be adapted to an airplane. You could mount it on a swivel, to move it over to the passenger side when flying alone, or push it up against the panel when you have a passenger (can you picture what I am trying to say?) Scott --- Mark Langford <n5...@hiwaay.net> wrote: > William Scott wrote: > > > a laptop. I had one. I will say this: Carrying > that > > laptop gets old. With all the new cheap > technology, > > may I suggest looking at something in the > > civilian/boating market that is less expensive and > can > > be mounted on your panel? Will it have airport > > waypoints? No. But most can be programmed for any > > along your route. > > I think you missed most of the points I tried to > make in my post. I already > carry a laptop to store information generated by the > engine information > system, and I find the benefits of trending engine > parameters far outweigh > the hassle. And I'm not about to mount a marine > GPS in my plane that has > no aviation database. What would you do when your > engine quit on a > cross-country and you needed to know the nearest 10 > airports, their > distances, and the orientation of their runways? > > I should have asked that all replies come direct to > me... > > Mark Langford, Huntsville, Alabama > see KR2S project N56ML at > http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford > email to N56ML "at" hiwaay.net > -------------------------------------------------------------- > > > _______________________________________ > Search the KRnet Archives at > http://www.maddyhome.com/krsrch/index.jsp > to UNsubscribe from KRnet, send a message to > krnet-le...@mylist.net > please see other KRnet info at > http://www.krnet.org/info.html > __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com
