Somebody, somewhere is using a GPS

Today Krista and I went up for an instrument flight of 1.6 hours. We went over to Petersburg to shoot an approach, which was in "actual" until we were a few miles out. We then went over to RIC to go for an ILS approach. Unfortunately, it was down for maintenance, so we shot a GPS approach in its place. We canceled IFR shortly thereafter since there were no clouds at JGG and we had time constraints.

But the real point of this flight was to try out the new toy: a Garmin GPSmap 296. We bought this about 2 weeks ago, to act as a automotive-based GPS and an aviation one. I can't say it has been without problems. The battery that came with it would not take a charge so a call to Garmin got them to send a new battery to me (BTW, call the non-800 technical support number if you want prompt phone service).

However, during the call to get the battery fixed up, they had me do a special reset, where you hold down the "out", "quit" and "nrst" buttons with your right hand (laying the GPS on the table) and turn the power on when the left hand. If you hold the power button for just the right amount of time (it will beep, let go RIGHT then), and then hold the other 3 buttons for 6 second, the device will perform the reset. If you get the splash screen right after power-up then you held the power button down too long. From then on the backlight would not work properly and the device would take a long time to acquire the GPS signals (normally it gets signals quickly and then has to compute for a while, but after this call it wouldn't get any satellite signals unless it was on for a few minutes).

Even with it not working perfectly (I will be sending it back to Garmin soon) I decided to try it out in flight. It has a great set of features for aviators and a really nice screen (especially when the backlight works). The most impressive features from my POV are the terrain warnings and the WAAS support. The WAAS support was providing incredible accuracy (7' margin of error!) - it had our altitude to within 0-3 feet of error, as measured on the ground at RIC and JGG. I couldn't believe it, to be honest.

My altimeter in the airplane was off (compared to the GPS) by about 150' in flight - I never compared the two on the ground to see if the altimeter was still off by 150. I have seen the airplane altimeter off by about 50 feet on the ground, when set-up via the Kollsman window.

As we would approach the ground during landing, the terrain warnings would go off (visual alerts) to tell us we were getting very close to the dirt.

I saved a map of the GPS track from today's flight. The inset shows how accurate it was as we did a touch and go on runway 16 at RIC.

Krista was in charge of the GPS today since I was plenty busy flying through clouds and talking to ATC. Next flight I plan to mount it on my yoke instead.

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