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Jeppesen's Internet Flight Planner - 1st Impressions
Hi all. Took a chance and purchased the JIFP subscription. With a free AOPA
membership renewal that you can keep even if you discontinue the service after three months, it was pretty much risk-free so Iuse the term "chance" loosely. Why? Well, I had purchased the Voyager flight planner at a discount last year but I've found that I've been printing out some pages from the AOPA/Jeppesen free flight planner for use in actual flights. Plus, my patience is waning with the performance of Voyager on my P4 2Ghz, ATI Radeon 9800-equipped computer. That should be adequate horsepower but it still seems slow. It seems anything Voyager does hogs the processor (60-70% CPU usage with no other apps running). I [briefly] looked into Flitestar but the $300 initiation and $400+ yearly service price for the package had me yearning for something in between. Enter the JIFP. At $115 a year (versus Voyager's $75/yr update fee) it advertises to have 95% of the functionality of Flitestar. The only thing it does not do is wind optimization, automatic fuel stop planning, some terrain features, and multi-routes. My first impressionsof JIFP versus Voyager: 1) Nice maps. The VFR map is sectional-like and the IFR maps look great with what seems to be just the right amount of detail. The vector maps are what I liked most about the AOPA planner and JIFP did not disappoint. 2) Very functional trip kits. They clearly have more experience than Voyager here. Voyager has some things that are a bit better (like the METAR map) but the JIFP is clearly more refined. The maps are much more usable while in flight because they have almost as much detail as my enroute charts and look like them too (I use Jepps). Voyager' trip kit is OK but drop the ball on the maps because they show only flight log line numbers for the waypoints forcing you to cross reference the flight log. Plus the clutter is terrible on Voyager's map detail in the kits. Black and white printouts are totally useless. 3) Weather a tie. Voyager downloads all the weather automatically which is nice except that those auto downloads are what causes much of the performance hit. I also like JIFP's print-out of the weather briefing in the kneepad size. Voyager prints it out in a full-page size so it doesn't fit neatly into the rest of the trip kit. 4) JIFP map quirkiness. As nice as it is, I experienced some weird stuff when using the rubber-banding feature. This happens in the AOPA planner as well. Sometimes it just does not want to anchor onto the intersection or VOR. I call it quirky because it happens one out of every 20 times. Today it took me 5 minutes to get it to anchor onto BDR instead of KBDR. Tried zooming, taking out airports from the view, deleting and re-adding, etc. to no avail. Then it just chose it after I was able to get the VOR data to show in the info pop-up box. 5) Overall speed. JIFP is much faster in map redraws, print preview generation, and route manipulation. This all makes for a much more pleasant user experience. I'll post a follow-up if I see anything that's new or noteworthy. I'd be interested to see other folk's impressions. I'd hate to see my money spent on the Voyager initial software go down the drain but if it's much more usable then it may be worth the $35 premium over Voyager's yearly update service. I'll chalk the rest up to experience. That's it for now. Hope this was useful to some of the readers. Marco Leon Posted Via Usenet.com Premium Usenet Newsgroup Services ---------------------------------------------------------- ** SPEED ** RETENTION ** COMPLETION ** ANONYMITY ** ---------------------------------------------------------- http://www.usenet.com |
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