Garmin Street Pilot GPS

This was something we could have done without but we felt it was a necessary item once we took to the air the first time over Knoxville.

This unit is really setup for an automobile but is very useful in the air when your flying locally.  It shows you where you are by the roads under you something were used to. The original reason we bought it was for learning how to use our Garmin 250XL GPS and we thought it would be a great tool for our working lifes. We drive to peoples locations to install auto glass and its a very useful tool for getting there.  We use it when we travel to, like our trips to Rotorway, Sun 'N Fun, Mentone, Oshkosh and last but far from least Homer Bell's Fly Inn in Ohio and John Spurling's Fly Inn in Tulsa, Oklahoma. These are very handy to have but like everything else costs big bucks.

The main unit is about $600.00 and by the time you add all the bells and whistles (bigger data chip, map information disk, extra antenna, 12 Volt Serial/Power supply cord) you'll have just under $1,000.00 invested in it. Then it will take you about 3 really long trips before you have a clue about how to set it up and use it lol.

One very big let down is the map data is really old,

at least 5 to 7 years best we can figure so you wont have any streets show up that are in that range because the map software doesn't know they're there. All of the main interstates and secondary roads within 3 years do show up so it isn't a total waste, at least you can get pretty close to where your looking for.   We've had this unit for a few years now and as of April 2004 there hasn't been any new data disks put out for this unit either.

Later after we got our handheld com we had something odd happen.

I was heading for the airport in one of my work trucks with the GPS on and I wanted to check the winds at the airport while I was en route. When I turned the hand held on it would lock on just about any channel and all you could hear was static. I turned the GPS off and the com would start working great so there's a definite problem between the two units being able to coexist in a small area.  To date I haven't tried using it in our heli and when I get around to it I'll post the results here.

After we got the thing we found we need to order a couple more adapters.  The unit only comes with a cable for hooking it to a 12 volt system and your serial port on your computer.  Uploading to this thing is very time consuming so we also wanted to be able to do it at home to.   What we ended up doing is using a 12 volt inverter to power it.

We also use this thing in several other vehicles we own to. Our motorhome has an overhead that prevents the GPS antenna from seeing the satellites so we had to purchased another antenna and 12 volt power cord.

The exterior mounted antenna they sell was big bucks so we just bought another standard one and installed it in the roof vent of our motorhome.  All we did was buy some coax cable from good ole radio shack, lash it to the vent braces and plug the antenna into the end of it and we were in business.

This thing can also be used as a stand alone unit meaning you could take it hiking with you.  The only problem with that is it eats batteries like there going out of style.  We even bought lithium batteries for it twice at about 13 bucks a set and they didn't last any time at all.  If you had a really large back pack to carry the batterys in and cost was not a factor it could be done though lol.

Other stuff they sell for our unit.