Nashua Festival, Avidyne and WSI

Hi all,

Went to the Nashua, NH (KASH) Aviation Festival today, which was pretty
well organized. I'm a Daniel Webster Alum so it was nice to see not
only the displays they sponsored but also all the buildings my tuition
built. :-)

The festival is largely a static display, which is nice because it lacks
the constant distractions and noise of an airshow, and good for the
public to get up close to aircraft, both historic and the average 172
like ours as we taxied by.

We did get a tiny airshow that consisted of a couple fly-bys of two
F16's from the NH Guard and a KC135 in clean and dirty configurations.
There was even a crazy guy with an RC plane doing a full aerobatic
routine over the taxiway. He made that aircraft do things I didn't
think even RC planes could do. :-) If you're in the area next year,
I'd recommend it.

Anyhoo, as to the primary reason for my message...I stopped by the
Avidyne booth and saw their Entegra $45K PFD and 15K EX500 rack mount
unit up close for the first time. While the Entegra suite was
impressive, I was most intrigued by the smaller rack-mount EX500 because
it would actually fit in our 172's panel without modification and it's
far more reasonably priced.

We got on the topic of weather delivery, and I told the guy flat out
that I'd never buy the unit with the current weather delivery mechanism
because (IMHO) it's a total rip off, and if he wants to make a sale
they'll support WSI.

He then told me that customers are generally dissatisfied with the
Orbcomm request/reply system (either for timeliness of delivery or cost
(or both)), and for that reason (or just that their strategy is to be
able to integrate with everything and everyone) WSI broadcast weather
support is "in the works". He also mentioned that it will display
traffic from a GTX330 transponder in addition to the usual Skywatch
interface.

I left there thinking if they manage to pull this off, I'll be drooling
all over the check I write for one of those...

Of course, the only downside to the units is that they're based on
Windows NT. Wonder if these guys ever heard of real OS's like vxWorks
or Linux. :-)

Check 'em out at http://www.avidyne.com/

-Doug

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Doug Vetter, CFIMEIA

http://www.dvcfi.com
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