I’ve been happily using the IFD 440 as my primary navigator for the last 9 months. It works well, is easy to use, and integrates reasonably with many products, particularly the Stratus 3. Setup was involved but not difficult, other than the traffic display, which is not adequately described in the manual. Avidyne was easy to deal with as usual on this front; thanks Mike.
The problems I’ve have had, user error mostly, were well addressed on the IFD side, however the two sore thumbs that remain are poor ForeFlight and GTX 345 integration. In particular:
File plan transfer is not reliable between FF and IFD via WiFi. Even if it worked perfectly, it is still much more at arm’s length than the Connext support, which keeps the app and navigator in sync when changes are made on the panel. Changes on the tablet still must be manually transferred, but it transfers to the active flight plan, so it is easier than the route load mechanism on the IFD, where I have to guess which of the saved routes with the same name is the latest update.
The Garmin GTX integration remains a problem. I’ll need rewiring to get functionality that works to a GNS 430W to work properly on an IFD. This appears to be entirely due to the inflexibility of programming for the the serial ports on the GTX, and the use of on-wire proprietary functions that the IFD doesn’t support. Even if I do this wiring work, with the “legacy” support from Garmin I’ll still have less available traffic information than I get from the GTX or Stratus over Bluetooth/WiFi.
I know that it is a lot to ask for Avidyne to reverse engineer and support the Connext protocols, and that the wireless support for Stratus 3 means that I can get all traffic and weather products displayed properly without a physical connection, but without some improvement, it’s hard to justify the expense of replacing my existing, working GNS 430W/FS 210 combo with another IFD.
I know how difficult it is to get Boeing’s attention on a ForeFlight issue firsthand, and I can’t imagine any useful cooperation from Garmin, but is there anything Avidyne can do to make progress on either issue? I want to make my panel Vantage ready, but short of completely deGarminizing, I can’t see a practical way to get there.
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