I earned my pilots license years ago, and although I'm no longer active I'm still a member of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association and enjoy reading my monthly "AOPA Pilot" magazine.

This month there was a review of the Garmin GPSMap 96 and GPSMap 96c (color) in the magazine.

Usually AOPO Pilot reviews high end panel mounted GPS units in the $10K - $15K range, so this $699 (for the 96c) is an entry level handheld avaition GPS to them. It's geared towards pilots with screens applicable to navigating through varying altitudes and areas of restricted airspace, but other than that it looks like your typical Garmin.

What I found interesting was the accuracy test:

quote:

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To test the accuracy, I took the 96c on my first geocache hunt. For those not hip to geocaching, you take the coordinates of a cache previously hidden by other geocache participants (a cache is typically odds and ends, a disposable camera, and a paper log stuffed into a Tupperware container), enter them into your GPS, and try to locate the cache based on the screen directions. A friend and I found our first cache near the Frederick Municipal Airport in Maryland, suitably with an aviation theme to the toys inside, and the 96c located the cache within 4 feet (depending on how high up in the tree where it was wedged that we held the 96c). And this was with the WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) turned off - we could expect to be taken even closer to the prize with WAAS on.

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Interesting that our sport was used to test an aviation GPS reciever.

~erik~

4' accuracy next to a tree?? Why do I have trouble believing that?

That must have been one of my vacation caches. I *always* get perfect coordinates when I place caches.