Portable Nav/Comm

Head-up displays, once and still the stuff of airline and military cockpits, will soon be an option in Cessna’s single-engine aircraft line. Cessna will offer the new Epic Optix Eagle HUD, a low-cost combiner display that’s capable of projecting not just basic flight data, but all kinds of imagery that any tablet can output. The […]

The new portable, externally mounted WingBug Air Data, Attitude and Heading Reference System (ADAHRS) from Straight & Level Technologies provides independent flight data for pretty much whichever aircraft it can be clipped to—as long as the aircraft in question doesn’t exceed 200 MPH. The device, CEO and inventor Alex Rolinski explained to AVweb, sends the […]

Sun ‘n Fun is the place for companies to show their latest gadgets and this year Garmin did just that with its GDL50-series portable weather and traffic receivers, which are available in both wireless and wired versions. The new units replace the first-gen GDL39-series ADS-B receivers. First the $849 GDL50, which is an ADS-B In […]

The portable ADS-B receiver market just got more crowded as Garmin throws the GDL50 in the mix. Garmin says the GDL50—which joins the GDL51 and GDL52 SXM-equipped receivers—is the successor to the aging GDL39-3D ADS-B receiver. Priced at $849, the device is available immediately and is also available in a remote-mounted version, the GDL50R. The […]

After reviewing Reliefband’s latest-gen wearable therapeutic neuromodulation device for sister publication Aviation Consumer magazine (March 2018), I started thinking more about motion sickness and whether I’ve done enough for the few passengers who lost their airport lunch in my cabin. The idea behind the Reliefband is to electrically stimulate the median nerve in the wrist, […]

It used to be that portable comm transceivers were bare-boned utilitarian units that served a single purpose: to talk your way down to an uneventful landing when the primary comm or electrical system failed. But there’s also an expanded role. For aircraft without electrical systems in the first place, the portable transceiver has to be […]

Seattle Avionics Software is known for supplying navigation data for a variety of avionics systems, in addition to it’s FlyQ tablet app and now it’s selling a low-cost portable ADS-B receiver. The Merlin—which is priced at $249.99—is based on the Stratux ADS-B receiver platform, but has been fine-tuned by Seattle Avionics and is fully self […]

As AirVenture 2017 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, opens on Monday, Garmin will have no shortage of new products to show. In addition to the two new retrofit autopilots (here’s a video report), there are two portable weather receivers, a new low-cost ADS-B Out solution for the market’s lower end, a third-party autopilot interface for the G5 […]

Garmin today announced the latest addition to its growing line of action cameras, the VIRB 360. The camera is a spherically stabilized, 360-degree compact camera that’s waterproof and shoots up to 5.7K/30fps resolution, plus it has a built-in GPS and a variety of other sensors. These provide customizable Garmin G-Metrix data overlays during video editing. […]

With the Model T and the assembly line that produced it, Henry Ford taught the world a seminal lesson in mass production and economics. Some two decades later, he got schooled himself when General Motors caught up and demonstrated a fundamental truth about selling stuff in a consumer economy: Markets stagnate and so do sales […]