Being cheap, er, frugal, er, broke, an aviation GPS isn't in my budget. Not that I really need it anyway; I'm flying ultralights currently and even when I had my T-Craft I didn't have so much as an ADF let alone a VOR... GPS didn't exist then.
But I like the GPS, and up until now I've been using a very basic non mapping GPS (Garmin Geko 301) for flying as well as hiking and hunting; groundspeed and ETA information are nice to have when you are limited to 5 gallons and low speeds! Recently I upgraded to a new mapping GPS (Garmin 60CSx), using the justification that the tiny screen of my old GPS was getting too small for my aging eyes.
Anyway, for some weeks now I've been trying to load aeronautical charts into the GPS. Finally I succeeded... only to conclude that the screen size is simply too small to show a useful portion of a chart at a useful scale:
This is a WAC chart; a sectional chart is even worse. Although the images may look OK here, try to actually read the frequencies, quickly, while still paying attention to your flying... add to that the fact that the map image takes up to a minute to load (for example, if you switch pages, zoom in or out, or scroll over to one side). So this option is out.
I then switched my approach, to overlay selected aeronautical data on the built in Garmin base map or topo map. This worked much better. An airport/facility database is available for free download from the FAA in Excel format, and with some tedious massaging can be converted into Garmin POI's (Points of Interest). There's a limited amount of information that can be stored, but I think what I have is pretty useful:
What I have here is identifier, field name, elevation, traffic pattern altitude if given (it isn't in this example), tower and/or unicom frequencies, fuel availability, manager phone, and a small space for comments in a user maintained file (that's the ATIS entry, or could be something like "RT TRAFFIC RWY 17"). Although it looks like there's more room for another four lines of information; it's not accessible (as confirmed by Garmin tech support).
Doing it with Excel got tedious, so I wrote a simple application to do the conversion. It's adequate for my needs, but too rough to share... so I'm wondering how much interest there would be in a shareware application, if it would be worth my while (cleaning it up for distribution would take as much time or more than I've aready spent getting it to work for my own use).
I was hoping to create visual indication of airspace, and I can sort of see how it can be done, but it's a lot more work than I'm willing to put it into it right now... and I would always have a sectional chart on hand anyway, if flying anywhere where it might be necessary.
-Dana
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
But I like the GPS, and up until now I've been using a very basic non mapping GPS (Garmin Geko 301) for flying as well as hiking and hunting; groundspeed and ETA information are nice to have when you are limited to 5 gallons and low speeds! Recently I upgraded to a new mapping GPS (Garmin 60CSx), using the justification that the tiny screen of my old GPS was getting too small for my aging eyes.
Anyway, for some weeks now I've been trying to load aeronautical charts into the GPS. Finally I succeeded... only to conclude that the screen size is simply too small to show a useful portion of a chart at a useful scale:
This is a WAC chart; a sectional chart is even worse. Although the images may look OK here, try to actually read the frequencies, quickly, while still paying attention to your flying... add to that the fact that the map image takes up to a minute to load (for example, if you switch pages, zoom in or out, or scroll over to one side). So this option is out.
I then switched my approach, to overlay selected aeronautical data on the built in Garmin base map or topo map. This worked much better. An airport/facility database is available for free download from the FAA in Excel format, and with some tedious massaging can be converted into Garmin POI's (Points of Interest). There's a limited amount of information that can be stored, but I think what I have is pretty useful:
What I have here is identifier, field name, elevation, traffic pattern altitude if given (it isn't in this example), tower and/or unicom frequencies, fuel availability, manager phone, and a small space for comments in a user maintained file (that's the ATIS entry, or could be something like "RT TRAFFIC RWY 17"). Although it looks like there's more room for another four lines of information; it's not accessible (as confirmed by Garmin tech support).
Doing it with Excel got tedious, so I wrote a simple application to do the conversion. It's adequate for my needs, but too rough to share... so I'm wondering how much interest there would be in a shareware application, if it would be worth my while (cleaning it up for distribution would take as much time or more than I've aready spent getting it to work for my own use).
I was hoping to create visual indication of airspace, and I can sort of see how it can be done, but it's a lot more work than I'm willing to put it into it right now... and I would always have a sectional chart on hand anyway, if flying anywhere where it might be necessary.
-Dana
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
