Work is well underway now (god, I don’t envy those guys job – what a mess!). Just the old radios and cabling will save 100lbs, they think. Decided to move up pressurization control from pedestal and have that space as an iPad mount now.
Just read that all Avidyne’s will be able to display Jeppesen VFR charts as well as all the IFR stuff with the new software upgrade. Not sure if this is something other navigators can do.
Reading that Avidyne thread…
which refers to the terminal charts, not any kind of enroute mapdata.
Doubly bizarre that the two cannot coexist. In say Jeppview they are the same data.
The old Avidyne MFDs could show the Jepp vfr enroute charts, but they were dropped in 2013 and it would be damn clever of Avidyne to incorporate the Jepp MFDVFR app in the IFD540 …
Peter
According to Avidyne both IFR and VFR will coexist in SW R10.2 This has been much debated on the Avidyne forum and finally put to bed by Simpson Bennet from Avidyne.
On a G1000 non-waas, software version 0563.26, VFR and IFR charts can be displayed from the same loaded SD card. So you’ll get the whole set for one airport.
I heard an interesting and positive bit of data the other day, from an avionics shop. The guy confirmed what I had heard elsewhere over a long time i.e. past QA was poor, with many boxes arriving with defects. In some cases the installer would wire-around e.g. a defective comms port by connecting the signals to another port (whether the customer is told is another matter, presumably, given the difficult choice of a long wait) but sometimes this is not possible. But he said the situation is now good and he is installing plenty of them.
Here’s a King Air that just had double IFD550’s installed in conjunction with G600 PFD’s. They love it and you can clearly see the synthetic vision on the 2nd IFD (something you can’t do on a GTN750). Despite Timothy’s feelings regarding Avidyne, they’re excellent units with a very satisfied user base. I think it’s important to show that viewpoint here sometimes – it has become decidedly anti-Avidyne around this board and Timothy’s bad experience has now probably got a lot of people scared and thinking about Garmin as the only option. But there is more than one option – Avdiyne makes good products that have happy customers.
Here’s what the pilot of the C90 said:“I have the IFD540 in my Bonanza and love it. Recently I was asked to pick the equipment going in to the panel of a King Air 90 that I fly. We got it back about 2 weeks ago. It has 2 G600’s , 2 IFD550’s. I made the first trip in it last Wednesday it is totally fantastic! You would probably have to try to get situationally disoriented considering all of the information that is available. We love this set up.”
Avidyne are doing what looks like a massively good value trade-in for your old GNS box:
However it appears that you will get a refurbished IFD box, not a new one:
Hmm, yes I saw the deal and I have been in contact with Steve Gubbins from Avidyne to confirm the offer is valid in Europe. The deal is available and has been communicated to the dealers. But I hadn’t realised that it was a limited offer and it appears you get a refurbished unit….
But for a dual, non-WAAS GNS530 Meridian, replacement with a IFD550 for P1 plus IFD540 for P2 seems like a very sensible move for a WAAS upgrade with minimal downtime and cost. But I think I will forgo the offer and buy new Avidynes and sell the outgoing Garmin privately. The GNS530 are worth $4500 as trade-ins on the scheme but I think they could be sold privately with a form 1 for more than that.
So that is the Com/GPS/Nav sorted out but an upgrade to the EAI and EHSI looks another 6-9 months away. Apparently G500 PFD are no longer available and EASA certification of the new TXi range is earliest Q2 likely Q3 2018. I like the Aspen PFD but it’s just a bit too small and crowded for me.
So the only option is to spend $4390 and have the original Meggitt EHSI’s upgraded to be WAAS compatible. Unless there are alternative PFD systems available I have not heard about?
AdamFrisch wrote:
Here’s a King Air that just had double IFD550’s installed in conjunction with G600 PFD’s.
Do you know if, and how, they get Jeppesen navdata, plates, etc on the G600’s MFDs and on the IFD550? They pay the subscription twice? I ask because AFAIK, you can buy a “all Garmin avionics in the plane” Pilotpak subscription for a fixed price (independent of the number of Garmin avionics) and a “all Avidyine avionics in the plane” subscription for a fixed price (independent of the number of Avidyne avionics), but not one that covers both brands.
