"Hilton" wrote:

Robert M. Gary wrote:
Dan wrote:
"Robert M. Gary" wrote:
o The 496 can . The G1000 cannot.
I'm sure some of the limitations of the G1000 are a result of it being
certified.

No doubt. Hard to see how that prevented the animated NEXRAD feature
from
being implemented, though; that really gripes me.

Could be a processor/memory resources issue, I suppose.

Its hard to tell and Garmin would never give you an honest response.
When I asked them why the G1000 doesn't have airways (shouldn't a
glass cockpit aircraft be set up to fly IFR w/o enroute charts?), they
responded that it would take an "enormous" amount of memory to store
all the airways in the U.S. I guess its lucky that it doesn't take
memory to know the terrain at every point on the earth!

Perhaps he was just guessing... We recently added Victor airways and
Jetways to WingX and the database size increased very very marginally. It
really isn't that much data. OK, we have an excellent compression
algorithm, but still... I'm absolutely amazed that such a sophisticated
device does not have Airways. The whole memory thing doesn't cut it. Right
now on my Cingular Blackjack (cell phone), using WingX I have every NACO
chart in the US (app, ID, STAR, MINs etc), every public and private airport,
airways, fixes, intersections, comprehensive AF/D, etc, and I'm not even
using 1/4 of my 2GB SD card. FYI: The database to store everything
mentioned above (excluding charts) on WingX is less than 5MB.

I'm hoping this Garmin chap was just guessing.

Hilton

The 496 has a massive amount of unused memory waiting for larger
aviation databases, so airways are a drop in the ocean.

Adding airspace to routes would be quite a different matter, as they
would have to take on the attributes of two waypoints - a big software
change.