Hello, KRNetters; Our little aero club here at work (Southwest Aero Club) had a presentation on in-flight wx options. To go along with it, we had a Garmin rep demonstrate the Garmin 396. This little unit is incredible. With the "aviator" service (I think it's a $50/mo. subscription) you get terrain, wx, even music. The rep flies the 396 all over the place, including way into the Idaho wilderness and hard IFR... his demonstrator is a Cessna Cardinal that he flies out of Missouri or someplace like that and his fun plane is a Decathlon. He's a CFII as well, and says he has flown the 396 side-by-side with top of the line ILS systems and it's as capable as the best instruments are (but of course not TSOd for that duty and not approved for instrument flight). The "HSI" function gives you all the same info as ILS, including vertical guidance.
Anyway, the 396 with satellite service puts into the cockpit what it used to take about a quarter-million bucks worth of weather radar, ILS, stormscope, ADF, HSI, and you-name-it into one portable unit. Also can do traffic advisories using xpdr data. And he showed the neat little "docking unit" that you can install in your panel to make the portable into a panel-mount, pop it in and pop it out and dispense with the bird's nest of wires. Yeah, it's a few bucks... but it's a whole lot less bucks than if you bought all the same functionality in separate boxes. Happy Friday; switch off now and back into my foxhole. Oscar Zuniga San Antonio, TX mailto: [email protected] website at http://www.flysquirrel.net
