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Garmin Expands Euro Charts for Aera GPS

Amazing - the first Garmin ever AFAIK to support non-Jepp (raster) charts.

I wonder what the UK ones are?

Price is high though - $410/year.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

They say the maps are licensed from DFS, the German ATC organization. They issue charts for Germany and a few surrounding countries. They don't do the UK from what I know.

Too bad Jeppesen does not market its VFR-GPS maps in the same way they market their vector maps.

Jepp have licensed their VFR/GPS mapdata to some people in the past. Flymap offers these for example.

But it appears, and also I got this from a flight planning software vendor a few years ago, that Jepp want a few hundred € a year for the data for Europe, per user, which is too much. Their retail price is about €250 and Flitestar is the only current way to display it (FS VFR Europe is the minimum and is about €100).

The $410 Garmin charge is in the same ballpark, but I bet they get that stuff for far less. No idea what DFS might charge but Memory Map sells the UK CAA 1:500k maps (3 in total) for about €20 each so presumably they pay about 1/2 i.e. of the order of €30 for the lot.

The problem with that approach (licensing nationally produced "ICAO VFR" charts) is that no two countries will look the same. Page 20 of my VFR-Europe presentation here shows just one small but potentially lethal aspect.

On a side note, I recall having some emails years ago with some anonymous chap on another forum who hacked into the Italian-made Avmap EKP-4 GPS, which is somewhat similar to the Garmin 695. Like no doubt most of these boxes, it runs some version of unix and he found some way in and was running his own apps in there

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The problem with that approach (licensing nationally produced "ICAO VFR" charts) is that no two countries will look the same. Page 20 of my VFR-Europe presentation here shows just one small but potentially lethal aspect.<

There was a European VFR chart harmonisation (workgroup) last year Jepp and DFS have changed there synoptic to have the same look a like... I use and like a lot the DFS charts....there are very good..

EBST

I have to say I find the DFS charts to be the clearest on the market - but I still prefer the original Garmin charts on the 795 with Jepp approach charts for the last phase of the flight.

EHLE / Lelystad, Netherlands, Netherlands

Jeppesen's new VFR product is actually vector maps, with very limited coverage currently, not a product which can run their VFR/GPS Raster Charts. I told them the old FliteMap product could run them; they had never heard of it. I asked about FliteStar being discontinued; they knew nothing about that.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
7 Posts
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