Review of Magellan 4040 and 4250

As I documented in my recent trip to Palo Alto, I had expected to use the Garmin 296 car kit to navigate my way through the silicon valley area. Unfortunately, the Garmin proved to be too smart for me. It also requires transferring map information of areas you expect to travel from a PC into the limited memory of the Garmin 296. After a few hours of unsuccessful attempts to get the Garmin 296 to work (I admit, I didn’t have a manual handy, but come on, I’m a software engineer!), I drove down to a local Costco and picked up a Magellan 4040.

My first impression was WOW. And this device only cost $299 (at Cotstco)? How can that be! The 4.3″ touch-screen slim Magellan 4040 is extremely easy to use. Entering addresses is a piece of cake and it provides voice-prompted turn-by-turn directions to anywhere. It also has millions of Points of Interest including the essential Starbucks in case you couldn’t spot one in the corner of the current road you’re on. It contains maps for US, Canada and Puerto Rico without the need to transfer anything from a PC (although this is common among all the portable car GPS systems, it was a pleasure to see when compared with the Aviation GPS systems).

Coming from airplane avionics and equipment pricing, the price of the Magellan is hard to believe. At $299 it’s less than 1/4th the price of a similar device for aviation. Even built-in car navigation systems are generally $1,500 – $2,000 and often provide less functionality. The Magellan kit includes a suction-cup based windshield mount. At first, I assumed the suction cup would be relatively weak and cumbersome to work with, but the device has a latch that when clipped hugs the windshield so tight it’s nearly impossible to pry off and it’s rock solid. The included car charger is also great and it senses when the charger is turned off (usually because the car is turned off) and will automatically turn the device off after 30 seconds to conserve battery when your car is off.

Although the built-in rechargeable battery should be good for about 2 hours of continuous operation, I rarely used it on battery power because most of the time it was in my rental car connected to the cigarette lighter.

Bluetooth and Speaker Phone Included

One of the major surprises was that the Magellan 4040 included bluetooth wireless and the ability to act as a speakerphone for any bluetooth enabled phone. That was a welcome surprise, but I figured there is little chance that this little unit could actually do a good job with sound quality and practicality of using it as a phone. I was dead wrong. Amazingly, the speakerphone was loud and clear on both ends of the conversation. Pairing my phone was relatively easy, although bluetooth in general is still a pain to synch.

Upgrading to the Magellan 4250

This past weekend, I noticed that Costco had put the Magellan 4250 on sale for just $349, so I promptly went back and upgraded my unit. The interface of the 4250 is nearly identical, however, it’s a slightly more attractive unit that is a little bit slimmer and provides built-in voice recognition capabilities. You start the voice recognition (which is impressively always on) by saying “Magellan”. It responds with “Say Command”. You can say things like “Nearby Restaurants” and a list of the nearby restaurants appears with assigned numbers. At that point you can say “one”, or “two” to make your selection. It works very well because of the limited vocabulary that it has to recognize.

Overall, I have been extremely impressed by the Magellan GPS systems and pleased with my purchase. Both devices seem to be solid and a great addition not just for a traveler, but also for the day-to-day use for any car that doesn’t have a built-in navigation system.

If there was one complaint I would say the system was a bit slow when using the touch screen to move the map. That was my experience with both the 4040 and the 4250 units. It just doesn’t seem to follow your finger as fast as one would expect when you want to move the map to look around an area. It would also be nice if you could choose the information that it displays on the main screen (such as your current speed, elevation, etc.). I was unable to find an option for that.

But if you want a nice portable GPS for your flight bag, this is the way to go. Don’t bother with the car kit upgrade of the Garmin 296.

Cessna Buys Columbia Aircrafts

As I had mentioned in an earlier article, a few months ago, Columbia aircraft declared bankruptcy.  It appears that last night at 8:30pm Cessna was awarded the winning bid for Columbia Aircraft’s assets.  Cessna plans to continue sales of the Columbia 350 and 400 under the Cessna brand (new names will be the Cessna 350 and Cessna 400). This is great news for the industry, for Columbia owners in particular and even for Cirrus owners.  Competition is a very good thing and it’s the main driving force that makes sure companies innovate, provide good service and continue to take care of their customers.

I am very surprised at the low winning bid of just $16.4 million for an asset purchase.  This is a huge win for Cessna too as it would be expected that they’ll sell at least 100+ planes per year.  Even if each plane provides a 20% margin, Cessna should be able to recover their purchase price within two years.  Not a bad deal all around.

I look forward to seeing Cessna improve the Columbia sales process and improve the service experience for Columbia owners. If pilots considering a new single-engine piston have good choices, we’re going to start seeing better innovation from the industry.

Review of Garmin 296: A Backup for my Glass Cockpit

Like many youngsters in the US (I’m not young, but I can dream), I’m extremely spoiled with techno gadgets.  I have 4 iPods.  Yeh, 4.  I have a Shuffle that’s used for decoration, a Nano for the occasional workouts (they happen once or twice a year), a Video which is now outdated and my new iPod Touch (it’s insanely great btw).  Even in both of my cars I have integrated GPS and laser-guided cruise.  Laser guided cruise is the best thing since sliced bread.  It’s the closest thing you can get to a car with auto-pilot.  You select your speed and the car maintains the speed by decelerating (braking) or accelerating as necessary to avoid obstacles.  And of course, in the SR22, the whole glass cockpit with dual GPS units and autopilot has me spoiled even when flying.

As I was marveling over all the electronics in the the SR22, I realized that my eyes don’t know where to look for the traditional instruments in case something went wrong.  If I had an electronics failure, not only would I have a hard time flying the plane, I’m almost certain I would struggle with airspaces and long-distance navigation.  It’s not that I don’t know how, but I’m sure the skill becomes rusty over time as the dependence on the glass cockpit increases ever more.

With all the redundancy in the Cirrus planes, I figured I still have to have a portable battery-based GPS as a backup system.  There are just too many pilot stories that start with “I lost my entire electrical system.”  So I decided on the Garmin 296.  The Garmin products seem to be extremely popular in aviation and were the most highly recommended systems by everyone I spoke with.

The Good

The Garmin 296 is a color GPS with a number of very attractive features including a movable map, terrain awareness, airspace information, airport information (including frequencies, runways and other info) and even an instruments page.

The 296 gets some getting used to, but as you learn to navigate and input information into the device, it provides back a wealth of information.  This single device provides everything a lazy pilot (A.K.A. me) needs to get to his or her destination without the use of the plane’s GPS and MFD units.

 

The instrument page recreates the essential instruments needed to fly the plane.  Although one must be reminded that the GPS can only provide ground tracking speed and the attitude indicator at best will be providing delayed information, the overall feeling of the Garmin 296 is that of comfort and safety, knowing that if all else fails, there is a good alternative way to track one’s position, even in the dark. 

 

Like the Garmin 430s, you can program your route of flight into the Garmin 296 with all the waypoints that you intend to use.  The movable map provides the familiar magenta-colored lines indicating your intended direction of flight, complete with airspaces, heading indicator, ground speed and distance and time to your next waypoint.

This unit has a TON of functionality.  You can save flight plans, checklists and all kinds of information I currently have no use for.  I found that most of the functionality that I regularly use in the Garmin 430s is also available in the Garmin 296.  That’s very comforting.

The Bad

The user interface of any product that has anything to do with the aviation industry is absolutely aweful.  The Garmin 296 is no exception.  It’s as if we are stuck in the 80s.  A collection of awekward buttons allow you to navigate the many screens and enter information into the system, but it’s painfully slow and unintuitive.

I purchased the car expansion kit for the Garmin 296, which is an additional $249 add-on kit.  Save Your Money!  Do not under any circumstances buy the car kit.  It’s a great idea: use one device in your plane and once you get to your destination, take it with you to your car and use it on the road.  Except the car kit comes with only a 128MB memory stick and software that needs to be installed on your computer to transfer a limited set of roads to that memory stick.  I couldn’t get the software to run successfully on my Vista laptop and eventually I gave up and bought myself a Magellan Maestro 4040 from Costco for just $299.  For the road, the Magellan is awesome!  It’s far superior to the Garmin and at $299, it’s a no-brainer.  I’ll do a separate review on that unit.

Price of the Garmin 296 is unexplainably high.  At $1,195, the Garmin 296 is the entry-level color GPS unit that Garmin offers.  The Garmin 396, which adds weather capability (requires a separate subscription) costs $1,795 and the Garmin 496 which adds a couple of other useless bells and whistles is over $2,000.  As a backup unit, the Garmin 296 is definitely the way to go as the extra bells and whisles will almost never be used, even in the case of an emergency.

Bottom Line

The Garmin 296 doesn’t meet my expectations of quality, ease of use and price.  It’s overly expensive, not very intuitive and way bigger than it needs to be.  But, it also has all the features necessary to give me the comfort I was looking for as a backup system.  I know I can rely on it to avoid airspaces and get me to my destination in case of a complete electrical failure in the SR22.  Since I haven’t used any other aviation GPS units, I’ll have to give the Garmin a thumbs up.  It provides everything you need in an ugly, unattractive and expensive package.  I will be keeping it in my flight bag.

Scottsdale to Palo Alto in the SR22

As the founder of a software company and a huge tech enthusiast, I’m always intrigued by the number of startups in the Silicon Valley area.  Every time I visit the area, I’m jealous of the environment and advantages that companies starting in Silicon Valley have over companies anywhere else in the world.  I decided to spend a week in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, to hang out and see what it’s like.

Being eager to try out my new Cirrus on a long-distance trip, I decided this would be a great solo trip to test out both the plane and my new piloting skills.  Planning for the trip, I realized Palo Alto’s airport has the smallest runway I’ve ever seen at 2400 feet.  Of course, with the SR22’s landing ground roll of about 1200′, that leaves plenty of space for an experienced pilot, but I’m not an experienced pilot, so the runway length was a definite concern.

I decided to practice short approaches at my home airport, Scottsdale (KSDL), noting the amount of runway space I use.  Since Scottsdale’s airport has an 8,200′ runway, I had never noticed how much of the runway I eat up on my landings.  The first time I took note, I realized I had used 3,000′.  Wholly smokes!  That would put me right into the bay at Palo Alto.  I definitely needed another try.  But as soon as I got serious about landing in a short distance, it seemed easy to get out at less than 2,000′, so I felt I was ready for my trip. 

I had my fantastic CSIP instructor (he’s reading this, so I have to be complimentary ;-) review my flight plan.  Once he gave the thumbs up, I felt good to go.

The 3-hour 15-minute trip itself was extremely smooth.  I obtained flight-following from ATC and listened to XM radio to pass the time.  One thing I realized is that for long trips, you definitely need sun-screen!  The sun can easily burn your skin and there’s not much you can do to avoid it.  I ended up using my Cirrus shades on the side window to avoid burning (I know, I know, that’s not a good idea when you’re flying VFR, but having traffic watch and flight-follow and peaking every now and then for traffic, I felt it was a safe decision).

The Approach into KPAO!

The airpsace around KPAO is a huge mess.  It’s surrounded by Class D, C and B airspace that makes it quite tricky to get in there.  But having done my homework, I was pretty confident that my route of going East of San Jose (Class C) and turning left into Palo Alto would be ideal (see the red lines in the image below).

 

Unfortunately as soon as I had descended to 4,500′ near San Jose, ATC informed me that I needed to go West of San Jose, not East and that I should make an immediate turn to the West (see the green lines in the above image).  That through a big monkey wrench into my plans, especially since the terrain West of San Jose is quite mountainous.  I decided to climb to 5,500′ to avoid the terrain and slowed down to about 100 knots.  I then obtained clearance through Moffett Federal’s airspace, but the clearance was given at or below 1,500′.  Here I was at 5,000′ less than 3 miles from Moffett’s airspace and I needed to descend fast.  So I put on full flaps and slowed to 80 knots!  I dropped like a tank (thankfully!) and reached the desired altitude of 1,000′ as I finally spotted Palo Alto’s tiny runway.

I was cleared straight into Runway 31, so I enjoyed the scenery as I passed over Stanford’s campus and set myself up.  The approach couldn’t have been better.  I landed right on the numbers proud that I could easily make the 2nd turn off of the runway when all of a sudden my engine quit.  I had previously put the engine into idle as I had landed but in my haste of avoiding airspaces and the change of plans by the ATC, I had forgotten to turn on my fuel boost.  Turning on the fuel boost is part of the pre-landing descend checklist.  Why that would cause the engine to quit, I have no idea.  It seems that there should be more room for error, but I informed the tower that I’ll need more time on the runway as I have to restart my engine.  They were cool with it and fortunately, the engine started right up on the first try.  Lesson learned!

The trip was very enjoyable and a big confidence builder as it was the first time I had taken a long 3-hour solo trip, about 550 nautical miles.  One pleasant surprise was that my entire trip used only 57 Gallons of fuel, leaving me with 35 gallons (or about 2 hours worth) still on-board.  Not bad at all!