Way to go Idaho

Had a great trip to McCall Idaho to attend a big BBQ pig roast my buddy puts on.  The more I go to Idaho, the more I love it there.   We departed out of Concord VFR and headed GPS direct straight to McCall airport KMYL.  You need to cross the Sierra Nevada mountain range so flying high is a good idea.  Winds were smooth and no major bumps at 11.5 so I leveled out there.  Once you cross the big rocks you're over the Nevada desert and we crossed Black Rock desert and noticed it's actually still flooded from all the rains last winter.  There is about a 50 mile stretch where I lost ATC due to radar coverage.  Total flight was 3 hrs exactly with a minor detour to fly over the lake.  My Twin Bonanza does about 165 kts in cruise so the flight would be about the same time in our 182RG.  

So awesome that in less time than it would take to drive to Tahoe I can load up the airplane and be in Idaho.  Not that Tahoe isn't beautiful too, but Idaho is pristine, cheap and reminds me of Tahoe 30 years ago.  Magical!

The flight back brought some big headwinds and continuous moderate turbulence at 12,500 ft.  The return flight added about 30 minutes to the flight time, but 3:30 still isn't bad and we still made it home in time for lunch and faster than we would have on the airlines.

Mr Avionics Shop

Yowza, these IFDs are RAD. I did the install myself, no issues. The guide that comes with it walks you through it step by step. I think I could do it now in < 10m. I went out for a little test flight this morning and I was amazed, everything *mostly* just worked right out of the box. Even the AHRS is perfectly aligned. How did they do that? 

As for the *mostly*. It's not reading my GDL-69A. Apparently I need to update it to the latest firmware 4.1..  need to be an avionics shop to do that part. Also I couldn't get the boxes to go into track up... they seem stuck in North up. I went to the user settings in the aux page and set it track up but still showing north up. RTFM!  You need to press in on the right knob and change the map orientation.  Duh.

I've got some learning to do to master these suckers but overall it's an awesome addition to the panel at a great price considering my G530w trade-ins and the free ADSB deal.  15k for a 1090ES transponder, 978 UAT ADSB-In, an IFD 550 with built in AHRS and synthetic vision as well as a backup IFD 540.  That's a lot of avionics for the scratch!  Of course I had two 530w's to trade in which are probably worth 8k each.  But the big deal for me was no downtime!  Of course, I need to have a shop install the ADSB stuff and upgrade my GDL69A firmware, but I'm guessing that's a 1 or 2 day project at most.