Latest info on Garmin 430/520,480 WAAS

[rsaltsman]

For those of you interested in the Garmin WAAS upgrade and recent issues with the 480 certificaton, check out Tom Rogers' new article "Latest On WAAS For The 400/500 Series Units Including The GNS 480"

http://www.avionicswest.com/updatepage.htm#93455

Tom sorts through the smoke with more insight and colum inches than most other articles that appear in the trade mags. While at his site, brouse around for his other informative articles.

Enjoy,

Robert Saltsman
Flying 8
Building another 8
Lutherville, MD

[fstringham7a]

After reading Robert's info on WAAS and Garmin my very wet behind the ears thinking kicked in.
As a high school chemistry teacher back in the very eary 70's I introduced my students to the wonders of the slide rule...fast forward......med 70's as I recall some yea who of a student brought in to my class a hand held 10 function electronic calculator. I immediatley band it because....."what if the batteries die then what ya going to do".....Well shortly about very fourth kid had one...then every 2nd kid... and those batteries seemed to last. Pretty soon these new fangled calculating devices had more functions than any slap stick. What really hurt was they even had a memory.
So with that said, am I missing something here or is big brother craming the old slide rule of aviation navigation (land based VOR) down our flying throat. I can see the wisdom of some essential stand alone nav aides (compass, hand held radio, pda avionics/moving map software, and good old pilot skill), but .............To me it is kind of like the LSA program where you can fly a light two seat aircraft on a drivers lic. but
lets not let a two seater with a little more horse power and weight have this privledge.
Forget the medical and have annaul flight reviews for geezers like me. I would bet that would make me and the skies safer.............The FAA and their committe's of they in my humble opinion are really making the skies less safe by net creating a nav system on the test and more accurate electronic based nav systems. Thanks for letting me vent and I do have a pretty good flame suit.

Frank @ SGU and SLC

[Davepar]

Can anybody boil down that article into more relatively laymen terms? It sounds like Garmin screwed up their WAAS implementation. They're working on a fix. Until the fix is available, you have to use some crazy program to determine whether the GPS will work for a given destination/time?

How did the 480 pass certification if it doesn't pass now?

I think we've seen the peak of Garmin's accomplishments. This is sounding like the backside of the curve.

[JonathanCook]

Not to defend Garmin, but only garmin and FreeFlight are certified for WASS. The 480 was WASS certified or in the cert process before Garmin purchased the company that created the 480. The article stated that the WASS RAIM prediction failed. This is due to a mathematical position and signal error. The article's author states it would be impossible for any manufacturer to meet the specification. I certainly would not call this the fall of Garmin. As far as I can see everyone wants Garmin in their panel.