496 beats G1000...

"karl gruber" wrote in message
...
Certification.

It costs to be reliable.

"Curator"

And it costs to _prove_ you are reliable, and if a problem pops up-start
over- and test again, and if a prob......

You get the picture.
--
Jim in NC

"Robert M. Gary" wrote:
o The 496 can . The G1000 cannot.

I'm sure some of the limitations of the G1000 are a result of it being
certified.

No doubt. Hard to see how that prevented the animated NEXRAD feature from
being implemented, though; that really gripes me.

Could be a processor/memory resources issue, I suppose.

--
Dan
T-182T at BFM

On Jul 20, 5:56 am, "Dan Luke" wrote:
"Robert M. Gary" wrote:
o The 496 can . The G1000 cannot.
I'm sure some of the limitations of the G1000 are a result of it being
certified.

No doubt. Hard to see how that prevented the animated NEXRAD feature from
being implemented, though; that really gripes me.

Could be a processor/memory resources issue, I suppose.

Its hard to tell and Garmin would never give you an honest response.
When I asked them why the G1000 doesn't have airways (shouldn't a
glass cockpit aircraft be set up to fly IFR w/o enroute charts?), they
responded that it would take an "enormous" amount of memory to store
all the airways in the U.S. I guess its lucky that it doesn't take
memory to know the terrain at every point on the earth!

-Robert

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 08:23:23 -0700, Robert M. Gary wrote:

Could be a processor/memory resources issue, I suppose.

Its hard to tell and Garmin would never give you an honest response. When
I asked them why the G1000 doesn't have airways (shouldn't a glass cockpit
aircraft be set up to fly IFR w/o enroute charts?), they responded that it
would take an "enormous" amount of memory to store all the airways in the
U.S.

I've found that with Garmin too, and I find it surprising as well as
annoying. What would be the harm from an honest answer (ie. "it's not
cost effective" or "it would require that we spend X in recertification"
or whatever the answer needs to be)?

I wonder if we're not hearing "Garmin's" "thoughts" but the thoughts,
opinions, and even guesses of individual employees. In my case, I'd asked
on the tech support line a while back whether the WAAS upgrade to the
430/530 line (which was still mythical at the time but which was known to
require significant hardware as well as software changes) would include
the airway-based flight plan entry mechanism found on the 480. The answer
was that this was too difficult for pilots to use.

Since that's exactly how we express clearances, I was shocked at the
answer. In retrospect, it's probably not a bad guess if someone is
familiar only with VFR flying. But I'd expect the company as a whole to
know that we IFR-ers are out there too.

Though perhaps there aren't enough of us using Garmins to make it cost
effective for them to add this. Or perhaps we already buy Garmins, so
there's no additional need for this feature from Garmin's perspective. I
don't like either answer, of course, but at least it would make sense.

- Andrew

Robert M. Gary wrote:
Dan wrote:
"Robert M. Gary" wrote:
o The 496 can . The G1000 cannot.
I'm sure some of the limitations of the G1000 are a result of it being
certified.

No doubt. Hard to see how that prevented the animated NEXRAD feature
from
being implemented, though; that really gripes me.

Could be a processor/memory resources issue, I suppose.

Its hard to tell and Garmin would never give you an honest response.
When I asked them why the G1000 doesn't have airways (shouldn't a
glass cockpit aircraft be set up to fly IFR w/o enroute charts?), they
responded that it would take an "enormous" amount of memory to store
all the airways in the U.S. I guess its lucky that it doesn't take
memory to know the terrain at every point on the earth!

Perhaps he was just guessing... We recently added Victor airways and
Jetways to WingX and the database size increased very very marginally. It
really isn't that much data. OK, we have an excellent compression
algorithm, but still... I'm absolutely amazed that such a sophisticated
device does not have Airways. The whole memory thing doesn't cut it. Right
now on my Cingular Blackjack (cell phone), using WingX I have every NACO
chart in the US (app, ID, STAR, MINs etc), every public and private airport,
airways, fixes, intersections, comprehensive AF/D, etc, and I'm not even
using 1/4 of my 2GB SD card. FYI: The database to store everything
mentioned above (excluding charts) on WingX is less than 5MB.

I'm hoping this Garmin chap was just guessing.

Hilton

Andrew Gideon wrote:

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 08:23:23 -0700, Robert M. Gary wrote:

Could be a processor/memory resources issue, I suppose.

Its hard to tell and Garmin would never give you an honest response. When
I asked them why the G1000 doesn't have airways (shouldn't a glass cockpit
aircraft be set up to fly IFR w/o enroute charts?), they responded that it
would take an "enormous" amount of memory to store all the airways in the
U.S.

I've found that with Garmin too, and I find it surprising as well as
annoying. What would be the harm from an honest answer (ie. "it's not
cost effective" or "it would require that we spend X in recertification"
or whatever the answer needs to be)?

I wonder if we're not hearing "Garmin's" "thoughts" but the thoughts,
opinions, and even guesses of individual employees. In my case, I'd asked
on the tech support line a while back whether the WAAS upgrade to the
430/530 line (which was still mythical at the time but which was known to
require significant hardware as well as software changes) would include
the airway-based flight plan entry mechanism found on the 480. The answer
was that this was too difficult for pilots to use.

Since that's exactly how we express clearances, I was shocked at the
answer. In retrospect, it's probably not a bad guess if someone is
familiar only with VFR flying. But I'd expect the company as a whole to
know that we IFR-ers are out there too.

Though perhaps there aren't enough of us using Garmins to make it cost
effective for them to add this. Or perhaps we already buy Garmins, so
there's no additional need for this feature from Garmin's perspective. I
don't like either answer, of course, but at least it would make sense.

- Andrew

There is software out there which you can use to add all the Victor
airways to your aviation database. Trouble is that Garmin units
display all the airspace instead of just those parts near your flight
level, which makes the whole thing too cluttered to be usable. We even
tried making them very narrow, but it was better without them.

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 22:01:22 +0100, Gilbert Smith wrote:

Trouble is that Garmin units display
all the airspace instead of just those parts near your flight level, which
makes the whole thing too cluttered to be usable.

I can see some benefit to displaying airways...but I view that as quite a
bit less advantageous than airway-based data entry. Esp. when making a
routing change in the air, this makes the difference between a no-chart
entry of the change and requiring that the pilot review the chart(s) to
determine the waypoint list before entry. That's "head down" time that
could be avoided by a better user interface.

Airway-based data entry does not require display of airways. What will
happen by display of the entered flight plan - presuming that it uses
airways - is that *those* airways will be displayed. But that's display
of the flight plan; not display of airways.

- Andrew

"Hilton" wrote:

Robert M. Gary wrote:
Dan wrote:
"Robert M. Gary" wrote:
o The 496 can . The G1000 cannot.
I'm sure some of the limitations of the G1000 are a result of it being
certified.

No doubt. Hard to see how that prevented the animated NEXRAD feature
from
being implemented, though; that really gripes me.

Could be a processor/memory resources issue, I suppose.

Its hard to tell and Garmin would never give you an honest response.
When I asked them why the G1000 doesn't have airways (shouldn't a
glass cockpit aircraft be set up to fly IFR w/o enroute charts?), they
responded that it would take an "enormous" amount of memory to store
all the airways in the U.S. I guess its lucky that it doesn't take
memory to know the terrain at every point on the earth!

Perhaps he was just guessing... We recently added Victor airways and
Jetways to WingX and the database size increased very very marginally. It
really isn't that much data. OK, we have an excellent compression
algorithm, but still... I'm absolutely amazed that such a sophisticated
device does not have Airways. The whole memory thing doesn't cut it. Right
now on my Cingular Blackjack (cell phone), using WingX I have every NACO
chart in the US (app, ID, STAR, MINs etc), every public and private airport,
airways, fixes, intersections, comprehensive AF/D, etc, and I'm not even
using 1/4 of my 2GB SD card. FYI: The database to store everything
mentioned above (excluding charts) on WingX is less than 5MB.

I'm hoping this Garmin chap was just guessing.

Hilton

The 496 has a massive amount of unused memory waiting for larger
aviation databases, so airways are a drop in the ocean.

Adding airspace to routes would be quite a different matter, as they
would have to take on the attributes of two waypoints - a big software
change.