Had a GNS WAAS data card come up INOP getting ready to fly to Portland Saturday. This is the second one to fail, the first one was a couple of years back. For some perspective they date from early 2007, so this one was 10 years old.
The first one that failed had been tagged as bad by the JDM app as I went to update the data in it. But this one failed between flights 6 days apart whilst sitting in the plane. The unit looked good on boot up, with the database revision showing as current. I tried the card in both the 530W and 430W with the same result. Neither unit would use the card which left me with a dumb GPS. "Dumb" meaning the obvious, in that didn't know anything about any airports or other facilities. Less obvious was that it gave me a message that all course data would be shown relative to True North. Confusing until I realized that magnetic variation was among the data it didn't have available. Radios still worked fine, but I had to manually enter all frequencies into the unit with the bad card .
Fortunately I have 2 sets of these cards, so I put one of my others into the 430W, which had the last data revision, but since the 530W was current, no real problem other than the units wouldn't cross-fill.
After returning from PDX I double-checked, reloading the current revision into the bad card (and a spare good one). The reload succeeded, but the card still was still rejected by the 430W.
Replacement card: $210.00 plus shipping. Lesson: Always be sure to have spares available in the plane .
I got dem data card blues
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- Rich
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I got dem data card blues
2002 DA40-180: MT, PowerFlow, 530W/430W, KAP140, ext. baggage, 1090 ES out, 2646 MTOW, 40gal., Surefly, Flightstream 210, Orion 600 LED, XeVision, Aspen E5