Early Pirep on Garmin 430 and 496 Integration

I finally put in the Airgizmos panel dock. I had the work done while I did
the WAAS upgrade to my Garmin 430 at Penn Avionics.

I opted to get the angled bracket because the screen on the 496 tends to
make the terrain and some of the weather disappear at a certain viewing
angle. The non-angled dock looks much cleaner to me but function won over
form.

I picked up the airplane near the end of the business day so I couldn't get
a thorough system check in with the tech that installed my unit. I paid for
that shortcoming by scratching head for a day trying to figure out why the
496 was not displaying the flight plan I put in my 430. A not-so-quick
search on the web made me aware to the fact that I had not set my "Serial
Data Format" under the Setup/Interface Tab to "Aviation In" from the "Garmin
Data Transfer" default setting.

Viola! Flight plan crossfill without the need to select "crossfill" in the
430.

I have the audio out from the 496 connected though my seldom-used (as in not
once) music input and it has worked during my initial tests. I can still use
the music input but not at the same time. Now I have to find the time to
head towards some mountains in VMC to check out the aural warning function.
However, there is a potential conflict here in that my 430W also has terrain
with aural warnings. I'll have to see how that plays out. Hopefully the
aural warnings won't step on each other.

The Airgizmos dock could use a little more room for the wiring. With
everything plugged in, it takes quite a bit of maneuvering to make sure the
wires are not pinched or get unplugged. That could be attributed to my
inexperience with the panel dock though.

A nice thing I noticed about the integration is that the flight plan will
stay in the 496 under a flight plan name of "Aviation In" even after the
interface cable is unplugged. This would be quite useful in the event of an
electrical failure. It kind of takes the 496 a step-up from a "back-up"
towards a real-time "fail-over" system (but not quite a real fail-over
system since the 496 is not TSO-146a of course).

I have four LPV approaches scheduled to arrive at my home airport later this
year and a number of others coming to area airports (look for your area's
future IAPs he http://avnweb.jccbi.gov/schedule/production) so I'm eager
to try them out after the Warrior gets out of annual.

I'll post about anything new I find later.

Marco