In article ,
Paul Tomblin wrote:
Our club is examining the question of putting one of these on one or two
of our planes. I'm a big fan of the 480 based on what I've read, but the
A&P who does all our work has disparaging things to say about them and
really pushes the 430/530 based on reliability and also about how much
easier the user interface is to learn and remember. Does anybody have any
similar experiences?

My club has 6 480's. I'd guess we've put an aggregate of 2000 hours
on them in the past couple of years. This is our third generation of
GPS boxes. We went from VFR-only Apollo Flybuddys to IFR Apollo
GX-50/60 series, to the Apollo CNX-80, renamed the GNS-480 when Garmin
bought UPSAT. We're currently working on upgrading the autopilots to
GPSS capability.

I've only flown behind a 430 a couple of times (in two different
planes owned by students of mine), so while I can talk a lot about the
480, I can't give you that much by way of head-to-head comparison. I
have no 530 experience at all.

As far as features go, the biggest thing the 480 has going for it is
the abilty to enter flight plans using airways, and WAAS.

Personally, I find the airway feature extremely useful. No dragging
out en-route charts to find intermediate fixes, and a lot less
key-punching to enter them (especially on long trips). It really
earns its keep on in-flight reroutes. It's got SIDs and STARs too,
but around here, SIDs are mostly vector procedures, and flibs don't
get assigned STARs, so I don't get to use those much.

The 430/530 will supposedly have WAAS Real Soon Now, but Garmin's been
stringing people along with that song for a long time. I suspect it
will eventually happen, but exactly when is anybody's guess. WAAS
gives you precision LNAV/VNAV approaches. For those not familiar with
this bit of wizardry, it basicly creates a synthetic glide slope on a
GPS approach. Just keep the needles crossed like on an ILS, and
forget all about stepdowns and that dive and drive stuff. I've got
some GPS lesson plans; anybody who wants a copy, just drop me a line.

There is no doubt that the 480 U/I is more complicated than the
430/530. My recollection of the 430 is that I was able to do simple
stuff (and even put in flight plans) without even looking at the
manual. No way you'll do that on the 480. For a personal plane, I
would say that's a non-issue. For a club, where many of the members
may not get a lot of "knob time", it's probably more of a concern.

I figure I can teach somebody the basics of the 480 in about 10 hours
(usually at the same time as we're burning off my club's mandatory
10-hour retract checkout). After that, I'd strongly suggest another
10 hours on your own, VFR, with the box before you go out IFR (even in
benign conditions).

Most of the guys in the club (even some people who fly a lot) have
mastered the basic stuff like going direct and dialing in an ILS, but
don't know the more sophisticated features. For people like them,
it's a waste of money to put in the better box. You need to decide if
you want to equip planes to the lowest common skill/training
denominator, or shoot for something better.

The 480 U/I is quite modal, so you can get into states where you're
not sure how to get back to where you were. I drill into people's
heads that hitting MAP twice in a row is the panic button -- no matter
where you are, it always gets you back to the home page. It may screw
up something you were doing, but at least it gets you back to
someplace familiar.

As far as reliability, I think that's still an open question. Some of
our installations are plagued by occasional communication gremlins,
where the 480 fails to talk to the xponder or the fuel computer.
These usually resolve themselves after a while. More annoying is one
of our units developed a strange disease where the two coincentric
knobs appeared to have become intermittantly coupled; you turn the
inner knob to select a letter, and it flips over to the next column on
the display, as if you had turned the outer knob. It's currently out
for repair.

I don't believe we've seen any total failures.

One mistake we made was equipping some of the planes with the blind
xponders. It's certainly convenient to have the 480 control the
xponder, but if the 480 is down, so is the xponder, and the plane is
unflyable. That's the problem we faced with the one that's currently
out for repair. If you've got functional xponders already, stick with
them. If you need new units, I believe there's one which is both
remotely controllable, but also have a face so you can control it from
the front panel too. That's the way to go.

One nice thing about the 480 (unique, I believe, in the field) is that
it's legal to fly with an expired database (even IFR/approach).
You're just required to verify that the specific waypoints and
procedures you're going to use are up to date by comparing them with a
current chart (or other reference).

The 480 has a much better moving map than the 430. Nothing beats
pixel count. But then, the 530 wins over the 480 in that department.
And then there's the G-1000 :-)

OK, that's the long essay. If you're looking for a quick sound bite,
I'd say get the 480, couple it with an SL-30, and pass on the fancy
xponder.