Another GPS question.
 

Can anybody help me with the following query? I'm thinking of buying a GPS and it is my understanding that there's very often a choice between the Europe data base and the American one. How is it then, that a friend of mine flew from the UK to the Caribbean on a holiday flight recently and said that he was able to follow the whole flight on his GPS?

I'm guessing here, but I would suggest that the database refers to local details such as frequencies etc that can change, whereas global features like continents and airfields don't change position too quickly.:)

HiC,

If you go to the Garmin website, you can download a "training simulator" version of some of their GPS systems. I've got the 430 simulator on my home PC - very useful for learning how to use the GPS without having to worry about actually flying the aircraft at the same time.

The simulators also come with 2 databases, and you can swap between databases with a couple of mouse-clicks.

I tried flying around the UK on the American database a while ago. Most of the information is there, but cut down - all the airfields are there, for example, but the runway layout of UK airfields isn't shown on the American database.

I don't know how accurately the databases in the simulation match the real-life databases - I've found a few differences, but they might just be different revisions of the databases. But if the simulation databases are accurate, then yes, I think it would be perfectly possible to follow a flight anywhere in the world, whichever database you've got installed.

FFF
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It depends on which one you buy.

All of them will still tell you where you are anywhere in the world, but the map coverage may be limited to a particular region.

For example I use a Garmin GPS90, this has no maps as such, but does have a Jeppesen database for all the airports, Navaids and CAS. The Jepp database can be updated to cover any region of the world, but only one region at a time (think the choice is something like Americas v Atlantic v Pacific).

I think the cleverer (?!) ones have a built in basemap covering one region only and this can't be changed but you can load other maps on top of that giving more detail but with smaller area coverage - this can be either in the basemap area or elsewhere. This bit is certainly true for the roadgoing GPSs, not 100% sure if this is also the case on the aviation ones.