New Color TFT Display Transforms Tried And True Aviation GPS Workhorse

By ANN Senior Contributing Editor Juan Jimenez

• Read Part I of this review

In the previous installment, we introduced you to Lowrance, a bit of the company history, and the major features and controls of the AirMap 2000c product. In this installment, we will cover mapping, navigation and other functions of the unit.

The primary displays of the Lowrance 2000c are divided into three groups -- Status, Navigation and Map. The status display shows the satellite signal capture display which tells you your position lock status, what satellites are in view and in reception, which ones are being WAAS corrected, as well as the current position error, speed and power voltage and status.

The Map mode makes available five options -- a Map Panel, a Full Map, a Compass Overlay map, a Digital Data map and a dual map display. The Map Panel is an EFIS-type display that shows bearing, track, CDI and destination identifier at the top, a map in the middle with side overlays of the groundspeed on the left, altitude and VSI on the right, in ribbon formats. The ribbons are semi-opaque, and allow you to see features underneath, on the map. under that is an 80 degree compass rose depiction.

The full map mode shows a map across most of the display, except for one area underneath with four data fields -- bearing, track, CDI and destination identifier. If you are navigating to a destination or waypoint, there is also a display of the direction to the destination or waypoint, and the distance remaining. The display is straightforward and easy to read, but there is a problem with the rendering of the map data that can sometimes cause large areas of the depiction to become unusable. As you zoom in, the water turns the same color as land, and boundaries for things like borders and coastlines are lost, and everything gets mixed up. We reported this to Lowrance technical support, and the have acknowledged it is a new problem, not previously reported, but the problem has not been corrected as of yet in the latest version of the unit's firmware.

The next map mode is a map with a compass overlay and navigation data on top -- groundspeed, distance to next waypoint, estimated time enroute (ETE), bearing to destination and track. Below the symbol for the aircraft, there is also a CDI for course indication. The digital data map shows a map rendering that occupies about one third of the screen, and the rest of the display shows discreet pieces of information, such as groundspeed, distance to next waypoint, distance off course, and more. The two maps mode is the same as the normal map mode, except that two map depictions windows are shown which operate independently of each other. To switch from one to the other you press the PAGES button twice.

All of these display modes, as well as the navigation modes, can be customized through the hierarchical menu in order to add or remove information as you see fit. You can also select what map features will be drawn by choosing from a list that includes aviation locations, cities, countries, counties, highways, and so on, all the way to wrecks and obstructions, should you happen to be using it on a boat, with the appropriate databases.

The navigation page includes a navigation panel and an aviation map. Version 1.3.0 of the unit's firmware -- the update is downloadable from the Lowrance site -- also has an HSI map. The navigation panel is similar to the map mode but it puts an HSI where the map display would go, and drops the map to the bottom, similar to dual map mode. However, the bottom map display has a nifty additional feature -- a flight director cue. For those of you not familiar with a flight director, when you have one on your aircraft it means you're either flying some kind of airliner (regional or otherwise) or your wallet took a large hit when you bought or upgraded your personal aircraft. Basically, a flight director shows you a set of yellow bars. To fly the route or approach, you match your airplane's depiction to the bars. When the airplane -- depicted by a red triangle in this case -- is parked nice and tight under the yellow bars, you're doing what the computer or GPS thinks you should be doing to fly the route.

The aviation map is very similar to the map mode display, except that it excludes everything but aviation-relevant information, and the bottom data by default displays ETE, destination identifier, distance to destination and cross-track error (XTK)/direction. By the way, all maps can be shown in track, course up or north up modes, a nice feature to have which takes care of all three preferences.

Of course, the navigation mode keeps track of airspaces and lets you know when you are closing in, or inside, one of them, as well as when you are getting close to your destination. The warnings are audible as well, but there's no way that we can see to patch those into your aircraft's intercom. This reviewer could not hear the warnings when I was flying the unit in a Cessna 172 with my Flightcom Denali ANR headsets. The warnings are very visible on the screen, though, and if you happen to miss one and another one is displayed, it sits on top of the last one. As you press the EXIT button to clear the last warning, the one before that pops up from under it, like plates popping out of the stacker at a restaurant -- and in the useless trivia category, now you know where the computer programming term "stack" comes from!

In addition to the features we have already mentioned, the 2000c has additional tools accessible through the menu system. The Route Planner is used to define routes using the GPS keyboard, and allows you to prepare the routes using any of the database waypoints stored in the unit. The My Trails feature keeps a database of your tracks and allows you to see where you have been, and gives you tools to manage them. Like any good aviation GPS, the 2000c has an E6B computer for airspeed, and another for winds. In fact, the 2000c's wind E6B can analyze your flight information and tell you where the winds are coming from.

The unit also has a FIND button that takes you to the database search facility. With it you can find airports, VOR's, NDB's, intersections, user-defined waypoints, map places, highway exits, streets and even addresses, depending on what databases you have loaded into the memory card. The test of any aviation database, in this reviewer's opinion, is the inclusion of those small, out of the way airports that are famous for some reason, but which are considered too small for interest by some GPS manufacturers or database compilation services.

My test airport is the 1,300 foot runway at Saba Island in the Netherlands Antilles. Saba is a tiny, spectacular island, the peak of an extinct volcano. It has one village, Hell's Gate, built in the volcano's caldera, and the one road leading up from the airport to the village was built by hand in the 1940's. It is 20 km long and has 20 sharp turns. The island also has a medical school which reminds this reviewer of Doonesbury, Duke and his illustrated tenure at a similar, but imaginary, institution. Unfortunately, the database in this unit doesn't have it. The island shows up on the map, but not on the database, so flying to it requires either putting the cursor on the island and telling the unit to take you there, or entering a user-defined waypoint.

In the next installment, we will discuss the MapSource software and how it is used to load custom maps into the Lowrance 2000c, and render our final verdict on the ANN review scale of 1 to 5 stars.

FMI: www.lowrance.com