I am not sure if it is still the official position, but the recent worldwide trend was to phase out VOR/DME but keep DME/DME for RNAV purposes. Admittedly, GA aircraft cannot really use the latter for navigation for lack of adequate equipment, but at least it’s a sign that DME is staying with us. Given the ever-increasing occurrence of GPS jamming and spoofing by Russia and possibly other countries, I’d say it’s nice to have.
DME will stay because it is widely used for airliner INS corrections. At a Eurocontrol conference I went to in 2008 they said there will be many more DMEs deployed; not sure if that actually happened but they do seem to be keeping existing ones. Sensible since nobody knows what Mad Pootins will be doing next.
Practically speaking a DME is really handy in Europe.
BTW NDB is the ground based transmitter. ADF is the airborne receiver.
ARJ 1
I think that depends on the output of the ADF unit, the KR87 I have plugs directly into the G500 but the G500 does not support all types of ADF data output hence some ADF units will require the GAD43e to convert the output of the ADF to something the G500 can use. On some flavour’s of the KR87 superflag is available , this function can be used by by G500 by ticking the box in the configuration menu.
GNSS outages and worse (spoofing) are here to stay (and probably worsen). A DME receiver being so simple to operate and the reading so simple to interpret, is a perfect cross-checking device for GPS navigation. Legal or not, I would not like to fly much IMC anywhere without DME. Not to mention that most conventional approaches make use of DME, and that substituting DME with GPS is something you should really, really understand well before contemplating. The AMC about that is a little special and just because you can legally make your own AltMoc to part-NCO AMC’s, I don’t think you can just ignore the AMC’s without doing anything else.
The AMC about that is a little special and just because you can legally make your own AltMoc to part-NCO AMC’s, I don’t think you can just ignore the AMC’s without doing anything else.
It is also 100% theoretical because nobody can see what equipment you use to navigate. The GA regs specify only what equipment needs to be carried. I must have typed that 100 times since EuroGA started 
GPS substitution for DME needs to be done with extreme care because in general you can’t be sure the GPS=0 and DME=0 are co-located. I’ve never investigated this and I think there is a standard format for a GPS waypoint name which does correspond with DME=0…
DME is also dead handy for general “how far to run” usage in flying. Mine is set mostly to my base 109.95 so when I do a local I just read the ETA off the DME And DME is a standalone box which can be replaced “surgically” with one from e.g. Ebay, and there is no setup, calibration, etc. It’s not heavy either, and the antenna is tiny.
Peter wrote:
nobody can see what equipment you use to navigate
Except you can’t use equipment that you don’t carry. That’s not just theoretical, or? Sorry if I missed your point.
It’s interesting that none of the European avionics manufacturers came up with a modern compact DME (or, better yet, a compact DME/DME RNAV box) for light GA. There are nice COM, NAV, transponder, ADS-B in/out boxes, but no DME. No ADF either, but that’s understandable. @tomjnx, if you are still here, would you accept this as a challenge?
DME/DME RNAV
As you know, for such RNAV you need scanning and for getting more than two, you need altitude which is not common in small GA.
NDB/DME must be the 2nd most available approach in the UK.
That’s ridiculously backwards.
Ridiculous or not its a factually true.
