Garmin 396 -- Maybe I spoke too soon...

So I spent three hours playing with a friend's new Garmin 396 last night,
sitting in a lawn chair whilst supping a couple of cold ones, and watching
as Hutchison, Kansas got the crap beat out of it with thunderstorms and
tornados. *Live*, on the unit.

At Oshkosh, my playing time was extremely limited, due to the feeding-frenzy
of pilots who wanted to see the unit. I watched for 20 minutes as others
manipulated the controls, and barely got to touch the thing before Mary's
patience ran out, and we had to move on.

Last night, however, my friend had to run some errands that took a couple of
hours, which allowed me to explore EVERYTHING the unit can do, and I've come
away with a whole new appreciation for the XM features.

Weather:
At OSH, the weather always appeared very pixilated and boxy. With hours to
mess around with it, it soon became obvious that the boxy look was due to
the fact that the demonstrators had the unit zoomed in to the 0.3 nm
range -- or even smaller. Zoomed out to a more normal 10 or 20 nm range,
the weather looks GREAT, and appears to be updating far more rapidly than
advertised. Most of the time the weather I was seeing was only 1 to 4
minutes old, which is incredible.

Within lines of thunderstorms, it shows individual severe weather cells as
"clickable" boxes. Run the cursor over it, and you'll see the cloud tops,
the direction it's moving, whether there is hail present, and the speed it's
going. Lightning is clearly depicted, and the various intensities of rain
can be easily discerned at a glance.

Better yet, when you're looking at an area of light rain, you can click on
the airport beneath the rain, and view the latest METAR. This lets you
truly "see" what the weather is doing, and gets around the problem of NEXRAD
radar being so hyper-sensitive that it depicts even light virga.

MOAs/TFRs:
Another thing I never got to see at OSH was the way the 396 depicts MOAs and
TFRs. Because of the active XM radio upload capability, the 396 doesn't
just depict MOAs -- it shows whether they are "hot" or not! That is an
amazingly useful feature that I had not heard anything about -- and the
active display of "pop-up" TFRs around sporting events could really be a
life-saver.

To say that this thing would have made our many cross-country flights this
past summer safer would be an understatement. We spent a couple of
unplanned nights in out-of-the-way cities, due to widespread storms. The
396 would make picking your way through that kind of stuff -- or, at the
opposite end of the spectrum, it would make the decision to land and sit it
out -- much easier and safer to do.

If you have limited yoke/panel space the 396 would be absolutely perfect.
Sadly, the screen is (IMHO) ridiculously undersized for what it's trying to
depict, and the processor is just too slow (refresh rates when moving the
cursor around are barely adequate) -- so I'm still going to wait for the
next generation of larger/higher resolution screens -- but my initial
dismissal of the 396 was premature. It is a marvelous concept that works
well, and will only improve with time.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"