Primarily for general aviation discussion, but other aviation topics are also welcome.
#1870987
I still miss my Lowrance Airmap 1000, with 5” diagonal square screen (3.5” square). Excellent contrast in all light conditions and it just worked. Dinosaur tech compared to SkyDemon, but in many ways better than the Garmin Aera 500 I replaced it with when Lowrance stopped data support.
User avatar
By Paul_Sengupta
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1871031
RisePilot wrote:I started flying in 2005...That's 21 years


Ah, now I see the need for GPS, given the maths... ;-)

Rob P wrote:Of course the earliest moving maps were greyscale, so we had to wait for the arrival of magenta.

I do recall a time using my Pilot3 to navigate across France


I bought a Lowrance Airmap in 1997 (original one, 5 channel GPS). It had a bigger screen than the Garmin Pilot 3 and had a more intuitive display and user interface. It had a cartridge database system so I could easily just plug in Europe or US for where I was flying. I used it for years until I bought a Garmin Aera 500! The Lowrance was actually more configurable than the Aera. Shortly after that though, Memory Map appeared on Windows CE devices with the CAA charts. Then some chap called Tim came on here with a trial, on Windows CE devices, of a thing called Sky Angel.... :D
Rob P, MikeB, townleyc liked this
User avatar
By kanga
#1871038
My first: mid-'90s, Garmin 'GPS II Plus' B&W "hiker's" (no inbuilt charts, key in your own waypoints and routes between them) GPS. I carried on flying with it thereafter. It was small enough to fit (velcro'd) on the coaming. It displays a narrow 'highway' with centreline representing the planned track, or (if too far off it) the direction and distance to go to regain it. It was ~10 years later before I had a first tablet and got a SD subscription for it. Ironically, the syndicate RF6 in which I first used the Garmin had a built-in Decca 'rolling map' display from early '80s. One of our members (Smiths Industries avionics engineer) had 'liberated' it from the company scrap pile when Decca chains started to be withdrawn worldwide; he had originally fitted it to a RF4, which was thus, then probably the motorglider with the most sophisticated avionics in the world :) Even without any Decca inputs, its inbuilt accelerometer system gave a reasonable estimate of distance and azimuth from 'starting point', ie where it had last been switched on.

Smiths was making (and widely exporting) mechanically displayed but electronically fed cockpit moving map displays from '50s. The one in the JAM Trident often attracts visitors' attention.
Danny liked this
User avatar
By Genghis the Engineer
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1871091
We had an INS fed 1970s(?) era moving map in the Jaguar I occasionally spent time in the back of in the mid 90s. It had a CAA 1:500,000 chart reduced to microfilm, and projected onto a screen between your knees.

For reasons that never made any sense whatsoever, the aeroplane was in the centre of a chart - given the view out of the Jaguar cockpit, and its typical flying speed, and its turning circle, anything behind you was of vanishingly small interest. Also the chart was never up to date.

G
Paul_Sengupta, kanga, bilko2 and 1 others liked this