My my. Went to the Avidyne demo on Sunday. Good bit of kit for satelliteWX. Some may say it is expensive at $12000 for the unit plus about $70month for premium sub and about a max of $4.00/hr for downloads(depends on refresh rate) Get METAR and TAF and METRAD from Met Dept. System works over the LEO sats on the Irridium mobile network hence the dollar cost.
Also, a new generation of strikefinder is also available and integrates with the METRAD pic. As does traffic. Avidyne is all for ADS-B as soon as it settles down over the standard. The US is still bickering over ES and UAT. The guy doing the talk personally believes there will not be any ground based radars in 20yrs in the US! Note- his personal opinion!
Also ran into a guy who flies in the state and says that TIS IS A WASTE OF TIME! Where you really need it outside controlled airspace it is not available. Controlled airspace with full radar separation and wall to wall ATC TIS comes back online...where you do not need it. So there you go, there is one guy who reckons a traffic device is needed OUTSIDE controlled airspace. He actually has a subscription to tracking software that downloads aircraft positions off the satellite to his Cirrus.
I reckon it will not take much to build a device that has both IN and OUT with a feed for most of the MFDs available as well as an outlet for PDA and still come waaay under the VFR fitment target. Time will tell if I am correct.
In closing, I am so glad that Avidyne is taking the stick to Garmin. Garmin think they are the MicroSoft of aviation. Healthy competition means in the end we the consumers have a win.
EDIT- not an advert for Avidyne....I hope?
Last edited by OZBUSDRIVER; 10th Nov 2008 at 05:56.