I am yoke mounting it in the TB20, replacing the 12 year old Garmin 496. Very few handhelds can output terrain warnings on a connector, suitable for feeding into a spare input on the aircraft intercom (“audio panel”), and these two units are one of the very few that do it.
In the TB20 yoke
I replaced the crappy Socata map light lamp (a lot of work to replace)
with two white LEDs in series, with a 2k resistor. The lamp was actually burning the plastic moulding!
Not bad for inside a hangar
Presumably Glonass is “nonexistent”
The above were with the external (top of dash) antenna, which makes a difference:
With external antenna
Internal antenna
So the people who say “my GPS works fine with just the internal antenna” can see how much less signal it is getting. If that scale is in db (logarithmic) the difference is an order of magnitude.
Howard wrote:
The pace of change is incredible. I just bought a 200Gb microUsb chip for £80. It’s smaller than my fingernail and it has a 200Gb capacity and I have plugged it into the side of my Mac to act as an extension to the main storage. A few years ago no one would have thought this kind of capacity in such a small form factor was possible…and in the meantime the phone manufacturers are trying to keep us happy with 3Gb or so of internal memory in their devices.
You might be confusing memory with storage there. Modern phones do indeed give you a great deal of storage, even a modest phone will have at leat 16GB, but maybe 2-4G of memory. But memory is a different thing. A well specified desktop PC (for high end work) may have 32GB of memory, which will cost around £350 or so and is in four ‘sticks’ about 6cm long by 2cm wide, often with a small heatsink, and will have transfer rates in tens of GB/sec. Your USB stick isn’t using that kind of chip. Your USB stick will be several orders of magnitude slower than the memory in a PC or a phone. Your USB stick will also be a good order of magnitude slower than the high speed internal storage on a phone or a PC. The typical SSDs in phones or computers will have transfer rates of over 1GB/second under real world loads (NVMe, attached directly to the PCIe bus), the flash used in USB storage might do 10MB/second on a good day under real world loads, and even with a best case sequential read, will only be about 1/5th the speed of the internal SSD in a computer or phone.
alioth wrote:
You might be confusing memory with storage there.
While I agree in principle with what alioth says, the terms “memory” and “storage” are actually equivalent. The important distinction is between primary (or working) memory which is the fast memory directly accessible by the CPU and secondary (or external) memory which is the slower, not directly accessible to the CPU, memory where files are stored.
Yep, the scale is typically logarithmic.
Has anyone found a way to transfer an IFR route to the Aera 660, from a phone, tablet or a laptop, without using Garmin Pilot?
It has wifi but AFAICT only as a client, so it can download database and firmware updates.
It has a USB connector.
The 660 looks pretty good. The GPS reception is amazingly good. I am using the external antenna here, stuck to the top of the dash
The plane is in for the full TKS installation which is nearly done. I took advantage of the downtime to do various little jobs like this.
Here it is running the Garmin safetaxi database. This works great in terms of seeing where you are on the taxiways but strangely there is no automatic transition between enroute maps and the airport charts. You have to manually zoom in and out, and it takes a lot of 2-finger swiping and is quite cumbersome. Whereas even the earliest Jepp FliteDeck product, running on the earliest 800×600 win98 tablet, c. 2004, could auto switch from enroute to airport plate. In so many respects technology has not really moved to be more usable.
Is there any way to make the Aera 660 display a line showing the track ahead?
I have a funny feeling it used to do that, but it doesn’t show it now.
Page 192 of the manual 
Sorry – unable to post an image at the moment
