Why so expensive (flight recorders)

No they can't, and they never have been hacked in 10 years. There's a huge
business on Garmin for travelling. While all navigators like tomtom, MIO,
etc. have been hacked (and you can upload maps to them and even change the
operating system- like for MIO) there has never been a single unique case of
someone that could break Garmin's algorithms for uploading a stupid map to
the device (their maps of course. there are also public maps).

Anything can be done of course. Even swapping the internal hardware with
another thing. But then you can also build a fake LX Colibrì as well.
There are more reasons to hack a garmin than to hack an LX, believe me.
Garmin maps costs hundreds of dollars. It's a huge business and you will not
find a single hacked map on the whole internet. If you can't upload a garmin
map without their code I let you imagine how difficult it is to hack the
firmware. The fact that they haven't been hacked is simply because it is
too difficult, and that's something going on since the end of the 90s! (To
be precise, there exists a software that allows you to change the welcome
text screen, and that's all).

Garmin's policy is that for each device you have to buy separately new maps,
or better a new unlock code for each device, at the full price. Europe's
maps costs more than a TomTom hardware+maps ! People nevertheless buy also
Garmin because they are simply the best around.

I compiled custom "extra" maps for garmin devices, topo maps, airports,
airspace etc for the Alps, making a Garmin screen more or less similar to
SeeYou mobile moving map using the "unofficial" cgpsmapper software (which I
paid for) so though I don't consider myself an expert on their firmware, at
least I can say that I spent some hundreds hours working on those devices.




"nimbusgb" ha scritto nel messaggio
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I fly with Garmin 76S and 76CSX. Like all Garmin models they cannot be
hacked.

Yes they can. Garmin tends to use industry standard processors and
components in their units so there's no reason why they couldnt be
hacked if there was something in it for someone.They use flash memory
for their code, they have serial uploaders to facilitate flashing new
updates. The fact that they haven't been hacked is simply because
there is no reason to hack them!