diamondaviators.net

For those with GNS WAAS units. I went to load the new nav data to my (rotating) spare cards today and lo and behold saw this notice in JDM on my Macbook.

The new update to the Mac Mojave OS (10.14.4) is causing problems with detecting WAAS cards in the Skybound G2 adapter. We do not recommend WAAS users upgrade to 10.14.4 until the cause of the issue is identified.


Sure enough, I have this version of Mojave and it couldn't detect the card(s). I have a couple of older Macbooks I could use but I have been thinking of ordering one of the Bad Elf Wombats anyway, so I pulled the trigger.

Got the Wombat today and it works as advertised using my iPhone. A couple of things that might not be obvious:

1. If you have GNS units you still need to use the Skybound adapter and plug it into the correct USB-A port on the Wombat. For SD cards, no additional adapter needed.
2. The Wombat has a second, 2.4A USB-A port (on the side) that is intended for charging stuff from the Wombat battery. The one used to load data is very limited in current output and should not be used for charging devices.
3. There are really two apps you need get. One to manage the Wombat itself (like updating firmware) and the JDM for acquiring/loading data.
4. Apple-haters prepare to rant. The apps are only currently available and supported for not-super old iPhones and iPads. No Android support.
5. You connect to the Wombat via WiFi. But while connected your cellular network remains available.
6. I haven't tried to see if a laptop JDM version would work with this device. Probably not, but...
7. Data transfer to the cards seems a little slower than when they are directly connected to my Macbook, but not extremely so.

Acquiring data updates over a cell network for the GNS cards isn't a big hit on my data plan, as the WAAS nav data is only ~7.5 MB for these units. For the G1000-type stuff with flitecharts and all it could be a bigger hit, so one would likely pre-download some other way.

I have not yet plugged the cards into the GNS units. But they seemed to load correctly. I'll do this later. If there are problems I'll post.

Both cards with updated data were suitably approved by the GNS units. Since they have been inserted before the effective date, I was greeted with the normal (and grammatically incorrect) alarm message that they had "expired" 23-MAY-2019

Jeppesen has now fixed the problem with JDM and Skybound on Mac. Tested yesterday.