PilotPak for G1000 by Jeppesen

[gsontheimer]

Both Garmin and Jeppesen have released PilotPak bundles for the subscriptions of the G1000 databases recently. As the Bundle for Terrain_9as, Airport Terrain, Obstacles, SafeTaxi, AirportDirectory, NavData Europe and JeppView MFD IFR Germany was less than the two products NavData Europe and JeppView MFD IFR Germany I had before, I ordered it immediately.

And this is my experience: Jeppesen should have tested what they intend to sell before they do. Whilst Garmin uses the well-known and robust FlyGarmin.com website to program the SD-Cards and allows an unlimited number of programming cycles, Jeppesen uses JSUM.

And JSUM only allows ONE download of the Terrain_9as, Airport Terrain, Obstacles, SafeTaxi, AirportDirectory & NavData Europe databases. Result: One cannot program a SD-Card pair. They advised me to use the new "DB Synch feature". But this is implemented only in Garmin G1000 systems with GDU sofware 10.0 and higher, not in the current DA40 software. So the SD-Cards were inoperative. Then they adivsed me to manually copy the databases from one SD-Card to the other. It does not work and only shows that Jeppesen staff does not understand the Garmin copy protection mechanism. And would you recommend such a thing to a pilot for an aviation device???

And to make things worse: For me even after resetting the JSUM "UpdatesRemaining" counter multiple times by Jeppesen staff SafeTaxi and Airport Directory Databases would not write correctly with JSUM to the SD-Card. I still do not have them.

My remommendation to others: Wait, until Jeppesen has sorted out this mess.