Garmin GPSMAP 196

[Guest Moghdad]

I just picked up one of these puppies. Anyone have any experience with them?

[Guest]

best buy on the market right now imho.i bought the control vision for my ipaq (i wish i would've gotten the 196) earlier last year.

[woodreau]

It's a pretty good GPSMake sure you get familiar with it using it on the ground first before taking it up into the air. It's a great SA tool to keep you clear of airspace.It's kind of hard to see in the cockpit even with the backlighting turned on in some circumstances.I have a cigarette lighter adapter for the unit (I think it comes with the unit - frankly I don't remember if it comes with it or not) But it allows me to keep the backlighting on to be able to see the info on the screen. Otherwise after a few seconds when on battery power, the backlight turns off and you'd have to fumble with the unit to get the lighting back on.Entering characters is a chore you have to scroll thru every letter to get the airport/waypoint identifer typed in.Get your flight plan entered in before you get in the cockpit. it's easy to do direct-to, but I don't recommend trying to put in a new flight plan in mid-flight. Unless you get someone else to do the flying for you. Or better yet, applying CRM, teach your passenger to enter the flight plan and then have him redo the flight plan inflight.On the ground (in land mode), I loaded the MetroGuide in the memory, have to buy a memory card first, but it's able to autoroute to an address. It comes in handy when I'm too lazy to look at a paper map.Cheers :)Woodreau

[Guest Moghdad]

Thanks for the feedback! I've been playing around with it for a few days now. You're right about the chore of scrolling through the alphabet. However for use in the local area I haven't had to do this much because I am able to compile lists of waypoints using a combination of point-and-click and the "nearby" feature, then use these waypoints to build flight plans.I have been carrying it around in the car just to get used to it. I have built up a little sight-seeing tour of local points-of-interest that I hope to try out in the air this week, maybe Friday. That will be its first cockpit test.The airspace feature should be reassuring. I live underneath the Chicago Class B and just a few miles from the Midway Class C. There are also several Class D airports within my local flying area (Gary, DuPage, Palwaukee, Meigs, Waukegan, etc.). So perhaps this unit will help to ease my airspace paranoia.By the way, yes the cigarette lighter power adaptor is included.

[woodreau]

One thing you might want to watch out for, if you're under class B, (or any overlying airspace) is to make sure you know the altitudes, because the Garmin 196 won't give you a warning if you violate airspace from underneath. It only gives you a warning if you're about to penetrate laterally. You can't tell just by looking at the display what the altitudes are unless you pan around the screen with the pointer and look at the pop-up boxes which will give you altitude floors and ceilings.Another thing to look out for is that there is no terrain/topography info, so just make sure you don't fly too low when you're trying to avoid airspace. The Garmin doesn't help you at all for terrain avoidance.It is good for looking up last-minutes freqs I forgot to write down on my cheat-sheet as part of pre-flight plannning. but it can get involved trying to get the map pointer moved to whereever I need to to look at the comm pages.I do like the "breadcrumb" feature, so that I can see where I've been. I was practicing holding patterns, and it was kind of neat to see that when I applied the correct wind corrections, the nice holding pattern pattern is all distorted, and that I was able to fly over the same point in space several times, e.g. the flight track overlapped so that it was hard to distinguish the individual holds.I also like the trip page. max airspeed. distance actually flown vs airway distance or as the crow-flies distance for cross countries. In a good windy day, I thought it was interesting that I was only doing 60kts over the ground cruising in a Katana flying into the wind, but on the return trip I maxed out doing 160kts over the ground.Cheers :)Woodreau/KMVL

[Guest]

Just a comment to "after a few seconds when on battery power, the backlight turns off and you'd have to fumble with the unit to get the lighting back on"This feature can be set in the menu - including not to be automatically switched off.RegardsTommyESMH