Ben C wrote:
I am looking at replacing my L-nav with either an LX1606 or Borgelt B500 (B800 if released). It will be used with a PNA running XCSoar for glide calculations. I would appreciate peoples opinions on the various merits (or otherwise) of these two instruments.

Do you have a special reason not to get a Cambridge again? Because in
my opinion, the CAI302 is the best vario. I have one in my Ventus.
Its biggest strength: the protocol is documented, and Cambridge is the
only vendor which published full documentation. If only all vendors
would follow their example...

Due to that, the CAI302 driver in XCSoar is already the best one we
have. And in XCSoar 6.2, you can download flights to your
PDA/PNA/Android phone right from XCSoar, without additional software.

On LX/Borgelt: we have drivers for these, too.

Borgelt cannot do bidirectional communication; things like MacCready
settings are copied from Borgelt to XCSoar but not the other way
round. And: the Borgelt B50 rounds the barometric altitude to 100ft
accuracy, which is of course unacceptable and unusable. I don't know
about Borgelt's newer products.

LX can do bidirectional, but that part of the protocol is not
documented; we're in contact with the vendor to improve support for
this. Some people at LX are very helpful.

We havn't seen a lot of demand for Borgelt support in XCSoar. If
newer Borgelt products have more features, we will extend our Borgelt
driver. We would need support (documentation and maybe test hardware)
from the vendor then. We havn't been in contact with him lately.

Max