I have always thought that it would be a nice training tool to be able to
get a handheld GPS to work with Microsoft Flight Simulator. I had success
with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, Garmin 196, and Garmin GPS III Pilot.
I would imagine that a Garmin 295 would also work.

Peter Dowson has some Flight Simulator utilities at
http://www.schiratti.com/dowson.html. One of them is a program called
GPSout that sends output from Microsoft Flight Simulator to external devices
through the computer's serial port.

I set the gpsout.ini file to "sentences=AV400", the .ini comments had it as
the singular "sentence" for AV400. To get the GPS to use the GPSout data,
I set the protocol to "Aviation In" and put the GPS into the simulator mode.

After getting the combination of Flight Simulator and either the GPS 196 or
III Pilot to work, I did some quick flying, but I did not spend much time
with it. There seems to be a slight lag in things like heading changes
compared to the real GPS. However, this is just a quick unsubstantiated
observation. Overall, it worked great!

I did a couple of very quick tests. I changed the weather in Flight
Simulator to a 36 knot crosswind and the GPS correctly showed TRACK rather
than heading. The vertical speed and VNAV functions also appeared to work
correctly.

I tried a couple of the other protocols offered by GPSout hoping that GPSout
could be used with a non-aviation GPS. Obviously, I changed the protocol on
the GPS, changed the gpsout.ini, and restarted FS. I had no success getting
a non-aviation Garmin 76 to work. Likewise, I had no success with the
Garmin 196 or III Pilot using other protocols other than "Aviation In."

I just thought that I would pass this along for anyone interested.

John Bell
www.cockpitgps.com