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Have anyone tried using the Vista in an airplane and could it be a poor man's aviation gps instead of the Garmin 196? quote:I recently bought the GARMIN 196 for flying. This is GARMIN's newest radio with an extremely fast processor. It is so fast in fact that they had the cajones to put a full feature "flight deck" display on the radio. That means that it can collect and process data fast enough to be useful during flight. That's turn rate indicator, altimiter, airspeed, rate of climb (or decent) indicator, and altimiter. The only thing that display can't tell you is if the aircraft is upside down. Aside from that, that's all the data you need to fly a plane, unless you are in a cloud, and you can't see the ground. Nowthen, this of course is not supposed to be used for that purpose, but it's great to know that if my electrical, and vacuum systems both go out at the same time, I can still get all that data from this powerful GPSr. With that in mind, 4 days later, I also bought a eTrex Vista. "Why does that matter?" I hear you cry. . . Well I went out this past weekend on my first two days of GeoCaching, and of course, took both radios! !

Looking over the description on the Garmin updates, didn't look like much new. Anyone find the update useful?

Has anyone noticed that it seems impossible to do a search or "find" for smaller airports on Garmin Mapsouce? Although they are on the maps, a search won't find them. Anyway to work around this or am I doing the wrong kind of "find". I've tried all the categories including transportation, and the smaller municipal airports don't show up.

Anyone found any undocumented features on their Etrex Vistas? I found that the backlight would go on each time you changed pages which I thought was probably running the batteries down unnecessarily. But I found that if you turn the settings for the backlight to be always on instead of the 15 second, 30 seconds, etc. settings, the light doesn't come on unless you specifically hit the light button (which is the on/off button on the right side). Also discovered you can turn the compass on and off by holding down the page button on the top right side for a few seconds. A compass icon shows up on the top of the screen when the compass is on. Remember, the compass drains the battery more when it's on.