This post is primarily for Dynon. I have the HDX system and I love it. That being said I am not a big fan of Seattle Avionics... I am a Mac person, have been since 1984. I have used Seattle Avionics for two years, I had to purchase a used Microsoft Surface tablet for that use alone... When Airmate came along I was hoping that it would be the answer for us Mac users. I have read good results from some. When my subscription expired with SA I went to Airmate. The first month was uneventful, but I did notice the changes in the charts and lesser amount of georeferenced plates... not a huge deal. The second month was another story.. The app simply would not work... I contacted customer support and they knew of issues with the latest updates... They were helpful and it was resolved that I would have to do it either through my Surface tablet (why switch) and that ended up not working) or manually download and copy to a usb drive. This ending up taking hours 5 to 6.... My question to Dynon is why can't you partner with Jeppensen? I download updates for my Avidyne in a matter of minutes using either Mac or PC. It is quick and seamless... Is it more expensive, yes but maybe Dynon can secure a reasonable price for its clients.
Seattle Avionics vs Airmate
- Thread starter VIFlyer
- Start date
jakej
Well-Known Member
Reasonable price . Good luck with that, Boeing now also bought OzRunways so there is less incentive for competition on their part IMO.
soarhead
Member
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2021
- Messages
- 41
I feel your pain. I am a Mac user and have tried both SA and Airmate.
The best experience I had with Seattle Avionics was to use their FlyQ EFB App and simply update the HDX wirelessly, using the slingshot feature in FlyQ. Could not be easier. I just found that for me, FlyQ was cumbersome as a Foreflight replacement. YMMV.
I am now using Airmate. It works better on my Mac rather than my iPad but is incredibly slow.
After my issues with Airmate, and they acknowledged their system was not working with Mac this month and they refunded my subscription .... I went back to SA and they sent me the following post;
"We've got a ticket for our development team to add a Chart Data Manager for Mac. It has been pushed back as other priorities took over, but we've received some more requests recently so hopefully it will help with the prioritization.
We have added your case to the ticket, and as more users request it, it incrementally increases the priority. Feel free to spread the word on that if you have fellow Dynon Chart Data users who want their cases added. All they would need to do is email us like you did."
So anyone out there that would like for SA to offer a Mac alternative please email them.
"We've got a ticket for our development team to add a Chart Data Manager for Mac. It has been pushed back as other priorities took over, but we've received some more requests recently so hopefully it will help with the prioritization.
We have added your case to the ticket, and as more users request it, it incrementally increases the priority. Feel free to spread the word on that if you have fellow Dynon Chart Data users who want their cases added. All they would need to do is email us like you did."
So anyone out there that would like for SA to offer a Mac alternative please email them.
I am also a Mac user. I have not used Seattle Avionics and have been using Airmate from the start. I agree with the above comments concerning Airmate and Mac. I'm running both Mac and FreeBSD Unix systems. The downloads are not too bad, but writing the chips is very slow. There has been talk about chip write speeds as a limiting factor. Most manufacturers only quote download speeds and not write speeds which are generally slower and create more heat in the chip which can cause it to throttle.
I have discussed some of the earlier reported issues with Airmate. We had a good discussion and many of the issues we discussed have been resolved and overall things seem to be getting better. The last update to the Airmate manager on Mac OSX Sonoma, 14.3.1, Macbook Pro 2023, did just fine, with a download, then the chip load, off line. I was using 13.3 on a MBP late 2013 box before that.
I use the Dynon FAA data and have not used the Airmate data and everything seems to work very well together. My FB app remains WingxPro on the IPAD with position data coming from a Lynx NGT-9000, and we'll see if I switch that over, but for now, that's what I use.
The first several sequences, though, I did have to load manually which worked. I wrote a zsh script to fetch and copy the data but haven't used that in a while. That script also works on an Intel running FreeBSD 12.2 and will probably work on most Linux variants.
I agree with the concerns on Jepp/Boeing pricing, and Boeing reminds me of another avionics company.
I have discussed some of the earlier reported issues with Airmate. We had a good discussion and many of the issues we discussed have been resolved and overall things seem to be getting better. The last update to the Airmate manager on Mac OSX Sonoma, 14.3.1, Macbook Pro 2023, did just fine, with a download, then the chip load, off line. I was using 13.3 on a MBP late 2013 box before that.
I use the Dynon FAA data and have not used the Airmate data and everything seems to work very well together. My FB app remains WingxPro on the IPAD with position data coming from a Lynx NGT-9000, and we'll see if I switch that over, but for now, that's what I use.
The first several sequences, though, I did have to load manually which worked. I wrote a zsh script to fetch and copy the data but haven't used that in a while. That script also works on an Intel running FreeBSD 12.2 and will probably work on most Linux variants.
I agree with the concerns on Jepp/Boeing pricing, and Boeing reminds me of another avionics company.