Pilot Reports 

My flight was to Asheville AVL from Toronto on Friday afternoon and  back today, Anyone in the north east or central US knows it has been quite a week end weather wise. Mist, haze, convective segmets and isolated CBs and major rain/wind storms all over the weather forecast was doable as on my route it was all PROB for the CB's , never the less there was a lot of cumulus build up and heat haze. I would have been uncomfortable doing the flight both ways without this system.

My goal for the system was really for WX avoidance and less for GPS flight planning ( I have a UPS GX65 in the panel). Bottom line AWESOME!! I went with the NAVAir/WxWorx system as I want constant updates (every 10 minutes or less) so worth the $50 monthly charge. While the GPS programming is less than friendly to me (a non PDA user) it works well enough and the WX over the ground overlay with selective Ground or Aviation features depending on distance scale is pretty good. BUT the weather is great - if you cannot afford radar on board or a built in system. Updates never failed , TAFs and METARs on demand but most important that NEXRAD radar with aged lightning strikes.

Combine it with my storm scope and you have a great system for avoiding but note NOT, IMHO, storm penetrating because of the latency. It gives great comfort seeing where the storms were and the intensity, or if is it just cumulus or something more sinister. Coming into Ashville there was a CB right on the field, we could watch as radar vectored us around onto downwind and then final as the storm moved north. - pretty neat we thought.

On our return there was a huge storm north of our destination and a couple of isolated cells south, Approach let us self vector around the southern cells and all we got was a little wet. Coming in to land although IMC we could clearly see the real active weather was still over 50 miles north and so no worries

Bottom line it is IMHO a great system for the price, a few bugs to be sure but AIRGATOR is very proactive on fixes. It also gave the co pilot - spouse great comfort watching us miss the storms as she could watch our progress very well even if we were IMC. Last it fits into the mooney without too many wires as AIRGATOR has a "all in one" harness.