IFD540 or GTN750 - any way to display video, or free format text?

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I looked at that camera. It sounds like it is not an IR camera but an image intensifier and probably Gen 2. Gen 3 are strictly export controlled, even 30 years after they first came out. I bought a Gen 3 tube many years ago (via an obscure route, for an experiment I was doing) and it had “1986” stamped on it…

I wonder what the image intensifier option in an SR22 is. If it is Gen 3 they “should” have big issues selling the plane to many countries. In fact just about all countries… it’s ITAR controlled. Even in the UK a Gen 3 scope is illegal to import except for police etc usage.

But Gen 2 scopes aren’t much good… they need a night with a decent amount of moonlight. Gen 3 needs starlight only, or less.

For IR vision (which I believe the SR22 option uses also) you need a deep-IR sensor. That’s a different device.

I have indeed heard back from Steve Jacobsen who very helpfully sent a fair bit of detail.

The long and short of it is that an IFD540 can be factory modded (at some additional cost) to have NTSC video input, which is then digitised and displayed on a 320×240 screen area. So the result would be similar to the KMD550’s 320×240 capability, as shown in the top post in this thread, though I would jolly well hope the quality would be better, after all those years! The KMD550’s LCD itself is only 320×240 so mapping 525-line NTSC video onto that is bound to produce a poor result.

There may be other, direct digital, methods but I am waiting to hear.

FWIW, you can now get VGA (640×480) IR cameras (google for FLIR Boson) and they are not export controlled at 9fps and with no real controls for the 60fps version.

This thread touches on some of the topics above.

If anyone is interested in having a go at displaying Golze ADL data on a GTN750 or IFD540, I would be interested in working on it as a co-operative project.

As an update, the ADL data can now be displayed on Avidyne IFD boxes but not on Garmin GTN o GNS boxes.