I sure hope that the ClearNav folks are gathering input here about the benefit of a good climb maximizer feature. I am in agreement with the posters here who think that only WinPilot has gotten it right so far. I do wish that the ClearNav software would include an emulation of the WinPilot climb maximizer so that I can finally ditch the damn PDA from my panel. The zoom-in feature that the ClearNav offers now is nowhere nears as good. As Tim has noted, the maximizer should come on automatically and quickly, then quickly go off when you leave the thermal. The WinPilot continuous graph is way more effective than lift dots.

One characteristic that is also important and not yet mentioned here is the matter of time delay. WinPilot has no discernable delay; whereas other systems, including ClearNav, have a time delay in the display that makes it very difficult to interpret what's really going on when trying to reposition in a thermal.