XM Weather alternatives at OSH?

[jmbaute]

I was curious if there were any rumblings at Oshkosh about cockpit weather from providers besides XM? I know Sirius has a product they are offering through a company called WSI, but that seems to be aimed at a different market.

I have been holding out; I already subscribe to Sirius for radio and am not a fan of the XM music programming (former subscriber)- I was hoping for an all in one weather/music offering from Sirius to be announced soon.

Garmin is probably in a long term agreement with XM, but there are a few manufacturers out there with no weather - yet. I have hope.

Anyone heard anything?

[lucaberta]

The only thing you can count on is a wider adoption of FIS-B, which basically provides the same weather information you can get today via XM, but over ADS-B.

The FAA is clearly going to invest a lot on ADS-B, and this might a good alternative to XM, also because it provides many other useful things such as TIS-B, successor to the now frozen TIS carried today on mode S radars.

The only drawback is that ADS-B coverage these days is limited. If you're not close to a ground station, tough luck. XM is there today, and will last long, given the fast adoption rate. If I were you, I'd go on XM for the weather alone, and keep Sirius for the radio programming; even if Sirius would be out on the market with a service similar to XM real soon now, would the GPS hardware out there work with the new service? That is the true question that Sirius and the GPS manufacturers should answer before I'd buy anything new.

Bye, Luca