EAA meeting report - electronic flight bag

[JohnR]

I ducked out of work for a couple of hours this morning and went to our EAA meeting. My Tech Advisor who works for Rockwell Collins talked to us about the electronic flight bag he built for his plane. It was pretty interesting to me as it is right up my alley. I had seen it in his plane on a couple of occasions when I went up with him and found it pretty interesting.

He is running software from RMS and it appears to be pretty good. HE had tried a couple of others but settled on the RMS Flightsoft and Vista package.

He has everything you would need in one box with easy updates that only cost about $150 a year. That sounded pretty reasonable to me. He is driving his with a Garmin 480 for the GPS but according to him you could use any GPS that has serial output and get the same results, even the under $100 ones.

It gives him moving maps, charts, flight planning, map overlays, and winds aloft and weather from XM if you want to pay the fee.

Of course it will hold a ton of MP3's so you can have your tunes if you want also.

It is built on an ITX mini board and runs a stripped down version of Windows XP from a CF card. I'm going to start playing with my own version as I see a lot of opportunities and possibilities there. He has been running his for about a year now and had a lot of hints on what to do and not do. If I make any progress on it I'll let you know.

[captain_john]

Now a versatile unit like this would be an interesting addition to the plane. Integration would be light and failsafe would not be a concern because it is not required in any way.

Let me know what you come up with. Fred Stucklen (local RV-9 driver and presenter for aiplane wiring at our local events) is doing the same type of thing. He was riding around with a laptop last I saw him. He lives at the Skylark Airpark in CT, I believe.

CJ

[Womack2005]

Good write up John. We have been installing a lot of EFBs in bizjets here. The most popular being the CMA-1100. But (this is no BS) we have also installed the NavAero EFB affectionately called the "T-Bag".