Roy,

I too just recently installed a GTX-330 and have it coupled to my GNS
430. It works well, but I think it works only near Class B airports at
this time. I recently flew my Turbo Arrow home (Central Wisconsin) from
Reno, Nevada. That was a long journey. We only got TIS coverage for
about 5% of the trip (near Denver, I think). The coverage was
disappointing. I also often fly by Chicago Ohare to go east, and that
works quite well. I am told that within 12 months, coverage will start
extending to the areas around class C airports and even further out soon
after that. I look forward to the more extended coverage. I hear that
coverage on the East Coast is quite good. I can give you a better
report when I fly to Washington D.C. in the next few weeks.

-Sami (N2057M, Piper Turbo Arrow III, Central Wisconsin)

Roy Smith wrote:

My club has started thinking about putting Mode-S transponders in our
aircraft (3 Archers, 2 Arrows, 2 Bonanzas), to take advantage of traffic
advisory information.

Does anybody here have Mode-S in their plane now? Do you make use of
the traffic info? How well does it work? How easy is it to use? What
do you display the info on?

Is the technology mature enough to invest in today, or do we risk being
on the bleeding edge? One possible route we're thinking of is not
investing wholesale in Mode-S, but waiting for our existing xponders to
die and specify Mode-S in the replacement units.

We're slowly moving towards MFDs in all our planes. Right now, out of 7
planes, we've got one MX-20, one CNX-80, and we're probaby looking at
two more CNX-80's before the summer. How does the traffic info interact
with the other displays? Does it just over-lay the moving map? Do you
need to dedicate a display to traffic?

We've got two schools of thought as to where traffic info would do the
most good, i.e. on a limited budget, which planes do we start equipping
with it first. One school says put it int the Bonanza because it's the
fastest mover. Higher airspeed, less time to see and react to traffic.

On the other hand, the Bonanzas are the most likely to be doing
high-altitude straight line legs from one place to another, so pilot
workload is low most of the time, and ATC is watching (either IFR or VFR
flight following). The Archers are more likely to be low down where
there's lots of traffic, doing training maneuvers without flight
following and where high pilot workload leads to a less effective
traffic scan than most people would care to admit in public.

Any and all thoughts on the subject would be appreciated.