Release 9.1 Approved

In case you haven't heard, I'm the new R9 Product Manager and I'm located in our Melbourne, FL office.  The early adopters and anyone else that has been to our engineering facility down here has probably met me.  I'm thinking of putting up a bio in another thread.

I just sent out an email on R9.1 contents.  I thought I would put it up on AvidyneLive in case there are some that read this and are not on the email list of owners:

- Mike Ingram
mingram@avidyne.com
(321) 741-8418


Dear R9 owners,

I’m happy to announce that Avidyne has received TSO and STC authorization for Entegra Release 9.1. We are putting together the packages for the dealers to do the upgrades so it will be available by the end of the week.  This upgrade is free of charge from Avidyne but there will be charges from the dealers.  We expect the update to take less than 2 hours.  Avidyne highly recommends doing this upgrade since it has many new features and fixes as listed below.

Release 9.1 Contents:

FMS Procedure Preview – allows viewing of a SID, STAR, approach, Direct-To, airway or hold prior to it being entered into the flight plan.  For example, you can see the airway direction when highlighting an airway in the dropdown, then view the airway being built as the ‘exit point’ is being highlighted.  The same for the approaches, see the approach and then preview the transition before adding it to the flight plan.

FMS Map Center View – This is a 4th view of the Map when on the FMS-Map Split tab that allows viewing of the highlighted leg of the flight plan.  You get into this mode by pressing the map knob to select the map ‘views’.

EVS – The MaxViz EVS infra-red display.  This is displayed in the lower half on the PFD and as a full screen on the MFD.  This is awaiting the STC to be able to turn it on within the software.  The adjustment of the contrast and brightness is on a single knob – very easy.  The ability to fully implement EVS is still awaiting the appropriate third-party hardware STC. Once that is complete, the EVS can be enabled as a paid upgrade in the field via software configuration.

Canada, Mexico, Caribbean METARs and TAFs – WSI offers METAR and TAF coverage all the way down to South America. You will see METAR flags through the Caribbean, Central America, and north South America. The satellite coverage itself does not extend farther south than Guatemala.

Color strikes for TWX670 lightning overlay.

Transponder Mode Switching – Most of this was fixed in R9.0.2 but there were still some circumstances where the mode would change without pilot intervention in the Becker Mode C transponder.

Dropped Radio Calls – Fixed an issue with the radio that when too strong of a signal was received then part of the reception was lost.  This would only occur at a small number of control towers.

Direct-To Improvements – There are multiple improvements to Direct-to, you’ll notice in R9.1 that when you do a Direct-To the leg description will show “-D->”.  Previously the Direct-To leg looked the same as the other Direct legs.  There were other Direct-To improvements that are less obvious but were needed.


LNAV+V Improvements – there are some airports with zero glidepath defined, the FMS will now inhibit LNAV+V, and now the glidepath will always be calculated from the runway threshold.

Keyboard Contrast – There were complaints about needing to reset the keyboard contrast periodically.  This fix will reset the contrast setting on each reboot.  You will notice that the keyboard display will no longer have the Avidyne logo and will not display information for about 20 seconds.

Fuel Range Ring – The fuel range ring is now displayed at all map range settings.

Frequency List Additions – ASOS frequencies are now included in the Freq List.

Negative Altitude Constraints – Altitude constraints below sea level were interpreted incorrectly resulting in the VSR being pegged to max vertical speed.

High Altitude Section ARTCC Frequencies – these are now decoded correctly for display on the PFD.

Airport Filter – The airport filter algorithm was improved to fix not displaying some ‘non-fuel’ airports when they should have been.

Class A Airspace in Europe – Airspace in Europe is now displayed correctly.

There were other changes to enable other aircraft and some installation improvements but the items listed above is the list that you will see when flying R9.  I had the opportunity to fly about 40 hours with Release 9.1 in an experimental aircraft and these fixes are great.  I’m sure you’ll love the Procedure Preview and will be relieved about some of the other bugs that have been fixed.

This link is a short AeroNews TV clip about Release 9.1, mostly about Procedure Preview. http://www.aero-tv.net/?videoid=ca0469fe-a831-4f0d-8e78-ca5b90bffb70.

Edited by AviMike - 14 Jun 2010 at 2:44pm