I am very well aware of the situation and, no, i am not ignorant twds the many users. My focus was on the company.
But avionics wise i can fly exactly the same approaches to the same minima – coupled – as a G6.
The T 182 RG otoh is a wonderful airplane! It’s a shame they don’t make those anymore!
Well, all we need now is somebody asking if G6 has BRS auto activation and then I can spin off a whole new thread…
No, it does not. End of thread.
Before you get so overly excited about my little comment: Do you think HBK is a very customer oriented company? You were more sensitive about smaller things.
I rarely get excited.
HBK is a company which lost its way about 15 years ago, and has not developed a single product since.
Fortunately they still appear to support all their products, which is a lot better than going out of business and leaving everyone stuck. I guess the $400/year KLN94 database sales are self financing. They must have a few k subscribers so that’s a few million, and I am one of those. On the KMD550 (the OP topic) I have no idea how many actually update it. I bet it isn’t a few k a month since programming and mailing them out would be a big operation. Mine was last updated in 2010, and that PCMCIA writer packed up (and the German company wanted the full new price for repairing it) so I can’t even do that.
I wonder if any similar company has ever gone totally bust, leaving a few k subscribers with no database?
There is a massive problem at the moment with many electronic components. Some are on 50 week plus lead-time, many are on “allocation” which is just rationing customers. On some parts order books are closed.
Old flash is a particular problem. We have just bought six figure quantities of one part to secure supply. Micron are shutting the doors on new orders.
That’s interesting. At work we don’t buy enough stuff to see this (100-1k quantities mainly) and being an old codger I have always used commodity parts (e.g. LM358, from 1972) over the fancy hi-perf single sourced stuff from e.g. Linear Tech. The commodity parts rarely go on allocation (the magic word which electronic parts salesmen love so much, because it generates panic buying and resulting nice bonuses 
). And we have big stocks of strategic parts, bought opportunistically on the US surplus stock scene. However, products like the KLN94 and KMD550 are mid-1990s designs and the problem there is getting hold of chips which are simply not made anymore e.g. 8k byte SRAMs. I still make one product, in 100-off batches, which I designed in 1991 and which uses a 128kbyte EPROM, a 128kbyte SRAM and a 32kbyte EEPROM and these parts are hard to get today. There is some obscure company still making the SRAMs. Of the EEPROMs, I last bought a load on Ebay (unused 1990s stock).
The 20MByte Intel linear flash used in the KMD550 will not exist anymore except maybe a few here and there (it was always a really obscure part) and HBK probably need a lot more of them.
What HBK could do, if there is enough business, is to emulate it with some modern chips and maybe a processor. But I doubt ther eis enough business and anyway the last person who can switch on a soldering iron left c. 2003.
Peter wrote:
No idea what LNAV/VNAV is.
You’ve never wondered what “LNAV/VNAV” minima on a Jepp plate means? :-)
Peter wrote:
128kbyte SRAM
These aren’t hard to get – Farnell list at the moment 47 different in-stock 1Mbit x 8 bit SRAMs. What’s hard to get is the SRAM in the package you designed the PCB for. There’s always an ample supply in a footprint that would require you to redesign half of your PCB…
Well, yes, SMT packages are easier but if you are building an early 1990s product then it is probably not SMT, and DIP packages are much more scarce.
In reality one can usually manage, because there is a huge industry flogging old parts. Plus Ebay. These range from cheap to very expensive… I bought some 20k Hitachi H8s for $6. Disti price was £9. Now they go for $20… There are some scenarios which can cause problems for production:
I suspect the last two apply to HBK. That leaves them with just one option: if they had to make a few k of these, they could build them. The PCMCIA housings are probably available. This is the exact same part as the Honeywell-labelled KMD550 cartridges:
