What electronics are worth buying

Thank you everyone for the great responses.

On Tuesday, October 23, 2018 at 2:47:54 PM UTC-7, John Huthmaker wrote:
With Christmas coming up, what are some things worth asking Santa for? Is there any decent GPS devices that are reasonably priced? I'm thinking around the $500 mark. I already have a handheld transceiver. I have a nice headset for power planes. I have a parachute. At my soaring club, all of the planes are as minimalist as they come. They're all steam gauges. What do you guys consider to be essential modern tech for gliders?


A Scout ADSB receiver ($200) seems a good buy if you already have Foreflight, for traffic awareness.

On Sunday, October 28, 2018 at 8:42:51 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Tuesday, October 23, 2018 at 2:47:54 PM UTC-7, John Huthmaker wrote:
With Christmas coming up, what are some things worth asking Santa for? Is there any decent GPS devices that are reasonably priced? I'm thinking around the $500 mark. I already have a handheld transceiver. I have a nice headset for power planes. I have a parachute. At my soaring club, all of the planes are as minimalist as they come. They're all steam gauges. What do you guys consider to be essential modern tech for gliders?


A Scout ADSB receiver ($200) seems a good buy if you already have Foreflight, for traffic awareness.

I'd like to buy a Butterfly traffic display to go with the $200 adsb Scout receiver, but Butterfly displays only accept the proprietary flarm data protocol. The only adsb receivers I’ve seen that generate flarm protocol data also require additional purchase of flarm. Its almost as if the Flarm people are trying to force US pilots to buy their product.

I had some bad fortune followed by some good fortune today. The bad fortune is I was supposed to go flying today after 4 weeks of delays, and I woke up at 4am passing a kidney stone. So its going to be another week before I get in the air. On the good fortune front I found a person selling a FastFind 220 on Ebay for $125 today. It has 5 1/2 years left on its battery, so its essentially brand new. Its never been registered or activated. I should have it in time for next weekends flight.

Now I just need to work on getting some sort of tracker.

The ability of the inReach to send and receive text messages, reliably and easily, cannot be overlooked or understated. And it works great as a Tracker. And its pretty cheap. My monthly bill is about 14 bucks. I use it on my Motorcycle, boating in the Florida Keys, and backcountry skiing. And Off shore sailing. And Hiking, Jeez I use it all the time!
When I landed out in back of beyond in Wayan Id a couple of years back I would have for sure spent the night in my ship without satellite texting capability's.
I landed Ok so I couldn't hit the SOS button, but I needed a retrieve, bad.
Thanks to Sandy Coleman who stepped up and found me with his Garmin GPS auto nav; he put my coordinates in and drove right too me, via a very roundabout way. Without those both those devices I could still be out there, skinning rabbits and living off the land.

I'd like to second Nick's comment.

My InReach sends my wife / crew a text when I land out. The text automatically includes my GPS coordinates. We have written instructions on how to put those coordinates into the tow vehicle GPS unit.

Plus, with those coordinates, at a contest, she goes to the retrieve office, they plug the coordinates into Google Maps, and, boom, detailed driving instructions are printed out.

If I have phone service, I confirm the coordinates from my Oudie just to make sure they match.

Lou