Simulator finished

I'm finally finished with my simulator, and I must say it's pretty bad ass...

I gave up on a frustrating battle with touch screen configuration, trying to simulate the G500 and GTNs, and trying to mimic my plane exactly... So the sim is a now six pack arrangement but it's fully functional, including a link to Foreflight on the iPad. I get to pretend I'm a freight dog I guess, but it's still very cool and good practice for both IFR and VFR... the final mile would be a small touch screen for the 530W which would make it fully operational without using the mouse/keyboard at all. I've even got real ATC simulation through PilotEdge. The land maps are actual ground bitmaps taken from Google earth. I'm glad I got a monster video card.

I've also discovered my sim is basically ghetto compared to what a lot of the hard core guys do. There is a huge community of simmers out there that are crazy about geeking out on this stuff. I feel like I've just scratched the surface of what one can do with commodity hardware, x-plane and a little ingenuity.

JPI 790 Ordered

The JPI 790 is finally available so I ordered it.  Supposedly it's a plug and play replacement for the JPI 760 in my panel.  So for engine monitoring I will go from

This:

To this:

The big advantage as I see it is a LED display instead of the gas plasma so it's easier to read, and also the readout above shows the EGT/CHT for every cylinder whereas with the JPI I have to press the button to cycle through.  Also this one has a USB connection on the front to load data instead of the funky serial cable the 760 uses.  The unit is a plug and play drop in replacement for the 760 and uses the same probes.  $1650 for the head only and a $300 core credit for my 760, so for $1350 out the door seemed like a pretty good deal, in aviation terms.  I do have one issue in that the new unit is 4.1 inches wide and the old one is 3.5, so a little more than 1/2 inch wider and I may need to cut the panel for it to fit.