Sami,

I've had a bit of success acquiring used avionics on e-bay. If you'd rather
not mess with it, you might try www.avionix.com (as someone else suggested),
which has just about everything. For GPS units in particular, you should
also take a look at www.avionicsgps.com aka Joliet Avionics (JA). These
guys regularly sell direct and on e-bay. My avionics guy told me that JA
regularly buys up all the reconditioned units coming out of Garmin. As a
result, they usually have a good selection.

Our needs are probably different, but my PA28-140 had a pretty pathetic
avionics stack when I bought it (all Narco radios, an original piper "audio
panel", and a no-name Loran, about the only thing I recognized was the
PM-1000 intercom). My number one goal was to get more reliable but cheap
(read: older) radios into the plane. For this purpose, e-bay worked fine.
I picked up a KX-175B, indicator, KMA-20 audio and KR86 with antenna all for
about $1500. These avionics are cheap enough that I felt it was worth the
risk of possibly getting a bum unit. However, if you're going this route,
make sure everything has a RECENT yellow tag and make sure you understand
e-bay's feedback system. Also, unless you have some hidden backchannel,
installation is going to be a major expense and is not terribly dependent on
the age of the avionics (unless you get something really old or strange).
That's something else to consider when thinking about installing older and
cheaper stuff.

Someone else mentioned buying a handheld GPS and reselling it when you
decide to upgrade. That's actually worked out great for me. Several months
ago I purchased a Garmin 196 for $1000. For various reasons, I'm now
installing a Garmin GNC-300XL in the plane and I've already sold the 196 on
e-bay for $930. So I paid about $70 to "rent" the unit for about 6 months.
Not a bad deal.

best of luck,
mark

"O. Sami Saydjari" wrote in message
...
I plan to buy my first airplane and "trade-up" in about 3-4 years. I
expect my initial investment will be around $75K. At that price, it
does not seem to be worth putting in brand new avionics to the tune of
$12-$15K (thinking specifically about a Garmin 430/MX-20 combo, or a
GX-50/MX-20 combo). At the sametime, I really would like the
situational awareness benefits of such avionics. Is it practical to
consider buying used avionics? If so, where might I get used avionics
(web site pointers, phone numbers, or email addresses would be helpful
in addition to names of places).

By the way, thanks for all the great help I have been getting on this
forum. It really helps me make some hard decisions about my first
purchase.

-Sami