On Sat, 06 Sep 2003 16:32:53 -0400, Andrew Gideon wrote:

I never have a (mechanical) pencil far from me; it's what I use to write
clearances, frequences, altitudes, etc. I assume that this would work as a
stylus.

No, don't use a pencil to write on it, it's easy to scratch the screen if
you use a pen or pencil. I use my stylus only, or my finger. To write
down freq's and such I use a pen, my stylus is clipped to my RAM mount so
it's at hand when I want it, but you won't use it that often. It's not
hard to input the things you want, in fact, now you really don't even need
to since you can assign buttons to different things. I have one button
assign to the nearest airport function, using it I just tap on the airport
I want and tell it to insert or whatever I wish.

So one can use one of many different GPSs? How long does the iPAQ's battery

I use the mouse GPS they provide, mine doesn't have batteries in it, but
the new one does. You would have guessing based on my use of the iPAQ 4
hours or so. I don't know about the GPS, but it has batteries you can put
in so that's a non issue if I read the specs correctly.

run both the GPS and the iPAQ? One of the major niches for what I'm
looking to purchase is a backup. This would include, of course, electrical
failure. So battery operation is important.

You can set them up to run on batteries if you want. They even sell a
pack to plug in and do this. You can also build your own.

A concern I have is stability of the iPAQ's OS. It's an MSFT product, no?
I've little faith in them, but I've never tried their portable versions.

Mine has never crashed, I'm using an iPAQ 3835 with ver 1.4 of the
software, plus I keep my logs with the aloft program on it and transfer it
to my PC later on when I sync.