A Few Useful Garmin Avionics Tips and a Change of Garmin Policy

[donkaye, MCFI]

First off, after I had a problem renewing my subscription to Garmin Pilot last week, customer service informed me that they were no longer including the Premium Upgrade as a part of the OnePak.  Disappointing, but not surprising.

When Garmin does a System Update to the products that I have, they usually put out an Upgrade Supplement that I review.  Usually I don't miss anything that can be useful to me, but this time I did.  For those that have the G500 TXi and GTN X50 Xi and missed them here are a couple of items that might prove useful.

1.  On the G500 TXi there is a toggle to see Density Altitude on the PFD instead of Temperature.  Once in the air the toggle could be switched back to temperature.  Of course if you have a G5 they added this data field when on the ground many software iterations ago.

2. On the GTNs when on the Flight Plan page, each waypoint can be configured to have 2 data fields per column instead of 1.

3. This is more for information, but on the Flight Plan Page for the GTNs, not only is the active waypoint magenta, but everything on the line including the Altitude Constraint is now magenta (the Altitude Constraint used to be Cyan).  This was important to me because after updating my TXi System to 3.8 the update failed and I lost all of my configuration settings.  (Note: that won't happen again because I downloaded the settings to an SD Card as I should have in the past).  The next few times I flew I couldn't get VNAV to work.  I thought I had done everything right; Set the VNAV altitude on the GTN, Preselected the lowest VNAV altitude, Enabled VNAV on the GFC 500.  I thought somehow the Upgrades to the TXi and GTNs were still screwed up and that the Magenta Color on the active waypoint confirmed it.  I had plenty of time to review the issue on our trip to San Diego for Thanksgiving.  I hadn't given any thought to Navigation source, since I was navigating on GPS on the PFD.  I was stumped until I looked at the navigation indicator on the GTN 750 Xi.  As you might have guessed it was on VLOC.  After switching it to GPS, VNAV became functional.  My sources are not sync'd together and I am going to check with my avionics shop to find out why not.  So if your VNAV is not working verify that the 4th required item, source is in GPS, is selected.  Anyway, that's what led me to the new magenta coloring.

[toto]

8 minutes ago, donkaye, MCFI said:

First off, after I had a problem renewing my subscription to Garmin Pilot last week, customer service informed me that they were no longer including the Premium Upgrade as a part of the OnePak.  Disappointing, but not surprising.

Definitely disappointing. Even though this always seemed like an awkward setup (where you get the upgrade to one product with the purchase of another product, and the renewal dates aren’t aligned), I have mentally discounted the price of the OnePak by the value of the GP premium upgrade.

Back to buying GP from Aircraft Spruce for me