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Touchscreen avionics - good or bad idea?

In turbulence, I just place two or more fingers on the bezel and operate the GTN650 touchscreen with my thumb. In about 300 hours, mostly VFR, I’ve never felt the need to use the knobs – I find the touchscreen so much quicker.

Glenswinton, SW Scotland, United Kingdom

Does the Garmin have a qwerty/z keyboard ? From what I have seen in pictures it is in alphabetical order and that to me makes it worse in turbulence as I find I spend more time with the finger hovering over the screen to find the letters on another device I have with such a keyboard.

LSZH

I’ve only demoed the 750 and 650 when the Garmin dealer visited us, but I really didn’t care for the touchscreen (and the menu structure of the GTNs).
Really don’t understand why everything has to be touch these days. The tactile input when using buttons and knobs should not be underestimated. The only thing I really liked with the touch GTNs were the pinch- gestures resizing the map. Just an observation and my 2¢.

Norway, where a gallon of avgas is ch...
ENEG

Does the Garmin have a qwerty/z keyboard ?

As a hardware/software developer, I would regard it as unbelievably dumb to not provide both types of keyboard.

The only thing I really liked with the touch GTNs were the pinch- gestures resizing the map. Just an observation and my 2¢.

The touch screen works much better on the IFD540 than on the GTN750 – last time I tried which was a year or so ago. And the KSN770 was a lot worse; reminiscent of the earliest Ipaq PDAs

I wonder how these work if you are wearing gloves?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

I wonder how these work if you are wearing gloves?

The GTNs work fine with most aircrew gloves. There is a glove qualification procedure in the installation manual. We’ve recently completed a military helicopter project with GTN650H and all users (with typical extensive military testing) were very pleased with both the touch interface and the back-up use if knobs for essential functions.

Avionics geek.
Somewhere remote in Devon, UK.

Extract from the IFD540 Manual about using gloves. Not conclusive as it depends on the type of material and thickness.

EGLK, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

The touch screen works much better on the IFD540 than on the GTN750

I wonder how these work if you are wearing gloves?

Could it be that the IFDs use capacitive touchscreens while the Garmins seem to use a resistive touchscreen, so in the former case you have to be lucky for gloves to work, while in the second case it shouldn’t be a problem?

LSZK, Switzerland

I’ve been using G3000 with two GTCs for last 25 hours and find it super quick compared to G1000 that I used earlier. It takes much less time to select actions, input frequencies and points names. I don’t have turbulence experience, as I had only one encounter and changed FL quickly. As others said, it is important to rest your hand instead of keeping it in the air. One thing that I would like is touch capability on the MFD for scrolling and zooming. Doing it on the small screens is not intuitive. Also, scroll direction is opposite to iPads, as you’re moving a cursor.

LPFR, Poland
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