Thanks, I wish I had known all that before spending $600 on the system. I already had a PDA, so figured I would get the best bang for the buck. I am also very disgusted with their flight planning software that runs on the desktop. From: "Mark Langford" <n5...@hiwaay.net> List-Post: krnet@list.krnet.org Date: 2005/11/18 Fri AM 06:54:31 CST To: "KRnet" <kr...@mylist.net> Subject: Re: KR> GPS
Dan Heath wrote: > Before you decide what to get, you should check out this one. I am only > posting this for you to have another option. > http://anywheremap.com/ AnywhereMap is famous for being the cat's meow for handheld PDAs, and for that purpose, I'm sure it's great. But in a PDA you have a teeny little screen that's hard to see (but it's far better than nothing), so AnywhereMap is fairly low resolution. For example, due to limited memory of PDAs, the database has no rivers, only big lakes, and cities are rather blocky, with only major highways shown. They now have what they call AnywhereMap XP, designed for running on notebooks, tablets, and laptops, which I ASSumed was a higher resolution version for Windows based computers. While the display is somewhat higher resolution, it uses the same low res database, so you get no rivers. I noticed this in about 5 seconds as I looked for Huntsville on their US map. I had a hard time finding it because the Tennessee river was missing! So I punched in M38, my home airport, and it said "not in database". Now that worries me. What if you're flying along and your crankshaft breaks, and you push the "nearest airport" button, and the one right under you doesn't happen to be in the database? Not a good thing. And it turns out that many of the features of the PDA version aren't yet implemented in the XP version, and the "help" files just plain don't work. Given that the instruction manual is about 10 pages long, help files would be helpful! I read complaints on the web that the stuff wasn't ready for prime time, but since they were a year or so old, I figured it was fixed by now. It's not. Couple that with the fact that they sold me a Haicom GPS that you could buy for $100 anywhere else, for $250 (it had an AnywhereMap sticker stuck to the other side, which made it more valuable, I guess), and I was pretty disgusted with my purchase. It went back in the box and back to them two weeks ago, and I'm still waiting for them to credit my credit card account. This stuff is fine for PDA's (so I'm told), but don't think you'll be happy with the laptop version. I haven't mentioned what I'm using yet, because I haven't fully tested it and can't swear by it, but I'll give a full report when I do. Basically it's a TPad 800 remote display, which is daylight readable, and 6" wide by 9" tall, mounted to the panel, dead center and right in front of my face. It's so tall it only misses the canopy by half an inch. It's hooked to my laptop, which is running Flightprep's "Chart Case" (supported by KRnet's own John Bouyeau), which is pretty awsome stuff. You have various modes of moving map, including overlayed on top of the current sectional. All of this is connected to a $100 Garmin 18 USB GPS plugged into the laptop, which came with free street mapping GPS software, so I can also use the laptop in the car on trips. The beauty of this system is that it cost me $1400 (no, that's not the beautiful part), but that when it becomes obsolete, I don't have to go out and buy another $2500 GPS box, I just buy new software. But ChartCase has regular updates, so that's not going to happen anytime soon. I basically have a full powered computer sitting on my panel. I carry a laptop anyway to collect EIS (Engine Information System) data anyway, so I might as well use it. Next improvement will be to replace the laptop with a "car PC", a little box that's about $300, and is a full-featured PC set up for 12V. I'll have to buy an "industrial hard drive" that is altitude compensated (hard drives tend to crash over 10,000'), which will drive the price to $600, but it's smaller and more rugged than the laptop, and can be permanently mounted in the plane. So I've got $2500 in a killer huge screen color GPS setup, that's not going obsolete anytime soon, a far better value for my money than a Garmin 396. Oh, and it does weather and terrain too (although I'm not up for the $30 a month WX weather subscription yet). Not as good a price as what Mark Jones has (that's hard to beat), but with better functionality and readability (although admittedly not 25x more functionality or readability!). Another alternative is a tablet PC. There are a couple (more on that later) that are daylight readable, but they are just plain bigger than will fit on my panel. I'll do a full report on this system when I have it up and running, but so far, the flight planning and GPS stuff works great! Mark Langford, Huntsville, Alabama see KR2S project N56ML at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford email to N56ML "at" hiwaay.net _______________________________________ Search the KRnet Archives at http://www.maddyhome.com/krsrch/index.jsp to UNsubscribe from KRnet, send a message to krnet-le...@mylist.net please see other KRnet info at http://www.krnet.org/info.html
