I felt like a kid at Christmas time—and the UPS man was Santa. The email I had received said that the Garmin 396 I had ordered had shipped and should be delivered in the next 48 hours. Every time I saw that big brown truck drive through the neighborhood I found myself looking to see if he was going to stop at my house.
The Garmin 396 is the toy I have been waiting for. During a serious search for better in-cockpit weather display solutions, the 396 popped up at Oshkosh 2005 and said “I’m here!” It promised to do everything I wanted, plus a lot more.
But I had heard that promise before and I was sorely disappointed with the PDA-based weather data solutions I had tried so far. Personally, I have been a hard sell on Garmin, being a Bendix King fan and all. I have a King 94 GPS mounted to a KMD 850 MFD in one of my aircraft and I really love it.
I have a standalone 94 in another airplane and use the “little” map all the time and though it is small, I love it.
The Citation I fly has a King 90B which at one time was the gold standard for GPS before the introduction of the Garmin 430/530 series.
I have had some less-than-fine experiences with some of the earlier Garmin panel-mounted products, and it took me a long time to warm up to the 430/530 family of products. I have, on the other hand, always loved its handheld GPS units. I have carried a Garmin 92 in my flight bag as a backup for years.
So when I heard that Garmin had married an X/M Satellite™ weather (and audio) products receiver with its popular model 296, I knew this had a chance to be good. I was not to be disappointed.
The box arrived at my door as promised, and inside of 15 minutes, I had it up and running. The weather feature, which was my primary focus for buying the unit in the first place, was activated by calling XM Radio directly, giving them the receiver code number then taking the unit outside and turning it on.
Within a few minutes I was receiving downlink weather. It just happened to be the day that Hurricane Katrina decided to run across the severely storm-beaten “Sunshine State,” so I had plenty of real weather to look at.
XM offers two service packages you can choose from, the Aviator Lite package which includes TFRs, METARs and TAFs along with the Nexrad radar, and the Aviator Package which includes all the above plus Airmets, Sigmets, echo tops, severe storm tracking, surface analysis, freezing level, lightning, winds aloft and satellite cloud coverage.
I opted for the full-blown Aviator package for $49.99 per month (subscription). Should I discover that I really don’t use the added features that this package features? I plan to switch to the “Lite” version, but for now, I wanted to see it all.
The package that Garmin put together is very complete. The unit comes with a yoke mount, a car (dash) mount, a 110-volt power supply, portable power supply for use with a cigarette lighter type power plug, some very sophisticated mapping software, a USB cable to attach the unit to a computer, a remote GPS antenna and a GMX 30 XM radio antenna. It also includes a nice little carry bag to put it all in.
The manuals are all typical Garmin—very detailed. A quick reference card is included as well. The unit will run in “Aviation” mode, as well as “Marine” and “Automotive” mode. I guess Garmin is figuring that it is less expensive to make one box that does multiple tasks, rather than separate boxes for specific purposes. There are separate marine weather products available for XM. I also assume that Garmin has figured out that there are about 600,000 pilots and about 190,000 private use aircraft, but some 60 million registered watercraft, and I don’t know how many millions of road vehicles in this country alone.
The 396 features a four-inch diagonal screen that is extremely bright and easy to read in direct sunlight. It is also the largest consumer of power. By reducing the screen brightness just a little, you can double the battery life on a single charge. The unit has a screen that will display your battery life in hours.
At full brightness, mine indicates just over five hours of use off a single charge with everything running. Of course, you can plug the unit into ship’s power and the point becomes moot.
GPS operation is typical Garmin. The trademark four-direction rocker button allows you to navigate through the screens, and if you have ever played with a Garmin handheld you will feel right at home with this one in a few minutes. The page button allows you to toggle between the moving map page, the route page, the present position page, the TAWS page and the “instrument panel” page, plus the XM Audio control page for use with XM audio products.
The TAWS feature will pop up with a screen-in-screen presentation regardless of which screen you are in anytime you come in proximity of something you have the possibility of hitting while in flight. It has dozens of little features like route tracking, which stores paths over the ground from past trips and can recall your track over the ground at a later date. This is a good feature for training instrument students, and might save your butt (or incriminate it) if you were to be accused of violating some airspace.
The databases are downloadable using a laptop computer, and there are separate databases for ground features and approaches. The unit has all of the published instrument approaches in its database.
While the unit is not IFR-certified, in an emergency it will definitely do the job. The airport database is equally extensive, showing all the runways, traffic patterns and frequencies.
Other value added features incorporated into this unit include a TIS display when interfaced with a Garmin 330 transponder, and XM Satellite audio products capability that allows you to play XM radio in your headset or through your audio panel.
But in my opinion, it is the availability of the weather products that make this handheld a must-have item. The weather products download seamlessly, and the age of the weather is displayed at the bottom of the map screen (the map screen can be customized to display just about any information you want in a number of different formats).
METARs are color-coded to depict VFR, marginal VFR and IFR conditions so you can tell what the situation is just by looking at a color-coded triangle at a location that has weather reporting. Moving the arrow (using the four-direction rocker) to the triangle displays the METAR. If you want more info, press enter and you will be presented with a more complete briefing.
You can also access text weather through the nearest button, again color-coding the weather, and you can read the expanded weather by scrolling down and selecting the airport you want to view. In that page, you can get the TAF (forecast weather), airport information and runway/traffic pattern information. All the weather products can be accessed by pressing the Menu/Wx button twice, and you can sequence through all of the products to which you have subscribed.
The satellite composite is more of a VFR tool, as is the feature that shows locations of fronts and surface weather. You can set these to appear at specific ranges so you do not need to view all of the products, all the time. A neat, “de-clutter” feature allows you to de-clutter the screen in steps, depending on how much detail you want to see.
If I have a criticism, it is that the Nexrad depicts precipitation as green, yellow and red like a radar, but what I have found is that green can be nothing more than a solid cloud deck, yellow is often light precip or virga, and red depicts significant precip, the kind you would want to avoid in a light aircraft. While that can hardly be considered a problem, I can’t help but wonder if that is intentional or just a function of the way Nexrad works.
The fact that the presentation can be looped or animated to show direction of movement is perhaps my favorite feature. This works on the Nexrad, as well as the satellite cloud mosaic. I have been out flying with the 396 and I can tell you that it is in my opinion, without a doubt, the best value for the money in the portable in-flight weather solution game.
I showed it to my chief pilot, who is a huge PDA/map guy, and he ordered a 396 within an hour of seeing it run. I believe that it won’t be long before the market proves that Garmin indeed has it right with this product. To be able to add this type of capability to ANY aircraft for about $2,500 was the promise that the PDA-based uplink/downlink, map systems have been touting for years.
If you have read some of my experience with the PDA-based systems, you know that I felt that they fell far short of their promised performance. The Garmin 396 delivers. Furthermore, the strength of the company behind it gives me confidence that the product will be supported for a long, long time. Some may have felt Garmin was late to the party, but I say that they have stolen the show.
Michael Leighton is a 3,600 + CFIIMEI/ATP as well as an A&P mechanic and former F.A.A. Accident Prevention Counselor. He operates an air charter company in South Florida. You can reach him via email at av8tor0414@aol.com.
