Piperboy
Its a pity that no one had the time to teach you a little about the King KLN series of GPS units because they have some very nice features and bring the navigation workload down when properly set up.
But it is not surprising a lot of years back I stepped aboad a BAe146 doing my line training on the type and set about putting the route into the KLN90 when the line trainer said " its the only aircraft in the fleet with the King, its far to complicated so dont bother with it"
At the time all the other aircraft had the truly dreadful Trimble fitted.
After two hours in the air I had the line trainer, trained on the King and its features like the easy direct-to in the flight plan page and the waypoint ETA on the same page, his attitude to the KLN was transformed once he had seen the way it worked.
I will be able to comment on the next generation of GPS units (GTN650) when I get the electric spagetti in the aircraft sorted out but I feel that only 5% of the functions of most GPS units are ever used because of lack of training and the rush to get into the air.
Part of the rush to get into the air is because the engine (and may be the hobbs) is running before the GPS can be started, with this in mind the GTN instalation on my aircraft will have the ability to run ONLY the GTN direct from the battery.
That way you can get the thing set up with the flight plan without the whole electrical system burning battery power or the engine running, once the flight plan is in the box you can shut it down and fire up the whole aircraft and use the crossfill function to program the second GTN650.
The other reason these units dont get used properly very much is the very short sectors that most of UK GA flys and the work to get a short flight to the isle of whight is not worth the button pushing, when you launch out of Oxfordshire bound for the north of Spain non stop the flight & fuel planning takes on much more importance.