I saw this thread some time ago but decided to say nothing until my AV80R came back from repair. Well, it has and I am NOT impressed. The original unit was bought new in August and worked very well in the air. My other half played with it while I was driving and got annoyed with the way it kept insisting on taking us the "scenic" route despite me heading the obvious way to the M40 from home. Probably just a set-up selection thing. It worked. The unit was always plugged in when in use and consequently the battery was always well up. The flight planning, being easy and quick did not run the battery down enough for the fault to show up. When it did show, the unit had not been used for some weeks, the battery was about half depleted and the unit failed its aviation database checks and lost ALL of my routes and waypoints. After recharging the battery it powered up fine but again, when launched with only 3 bars out of 4 in the battery, it crashed and wiped all of my entered data.
The replacement unit came yesterday, via Pooleys who have been very helpful. Being a new unit, it came with a November 2008 database which I need to update. Normally you would register a new unit and they enable a single free database download, valid up to 45 days from the invoice date. With a replacement unit, you don't have a new invoice so you have to contact some database department at Bendix King and try to explain why you need another free database download....... What a pity this is not done by the service centre rather than leaving it for the poor customer.
After partially charging the battery on the replacement unit I powered it up and went into the flying mode to make sure that it doesn't show the fault of the previous unit, phew, OK. Today I went to the driving mode and find that the new unit crashes in spectacular style whenever you try to input a street in the "find address" option of the driving programme. I have connected it to the internet and downloaded the latest operating system files but it still crashes at the find address option.
I will be talking to Pooleys on Monday morning, again!
So, when the unit is working properly it is good. It is small, neat, easy to use and does pretty much what you want. The screen is bright enough for bubble canopy use if you angle it carefully. A good range of mounting hardware is supplied. I would like it to keep a log of flights with take off and landing times going back further than ONE flight. I used the unit, handheld, on the bus in Manchester and it was very helpful. Warned me when my stop was coming up and guiding me to my sisters house through a maze of backstreets at night. Perhaps I have been unlucky but the reliability so far has been piss poor. It doesn't inspire confidence. I will be taking a good old Garmin 12XL along as a backup for some time, assuming that I actually get a working replacement unit "before one of us dies".
Rans6Andrew.
edited to insert a missing word - sorry