I had decided to spend £1000+ on a larger colour gamin unit. That was before I bought the GPS dongle for my laptop. Using Navbox to create a route, Memory Maps with the route from Navbox and the netbook I already had, I found that the PC could do just what I wanted the colour Gamin to do. Plot my position on the latest charts that were digitally stored in Memory Map when flying. I saved over £1000 and had brilliant results.

Now SkyDemon is here and it's much much better than Navbox and better value. Problem is InFlight doesn't work on a PC (though I bought that as well). I now use Skydemon to plan my flight - it's fantastic for that. But as I don't want to buy yet another PDA or GPS unit, I still have to resort to exporting the route and then importing to Memory Map. Worse as the export from the SkyDemon Plan doesn't seem to be readable from Memory Maps, I first export it to my Garmin unit, then import it from the Garmin to Memory Maps and off I go.

Now that tablets are on their way, with built in GPS, phone, a size manageble in a plane but bigger than a PDA, light and with good batteries surely it makes sense to put InFlight on a PC platform or as a poor substitute have SkyDemon Plan track using the GPS! Surely if you've got the software working on a cut down version of Windows it's not too much a step to run it on Windows XP, Vista or 7. It's a sensible move the only people who won't be happy would be Garmin!

Note I still fly with the Garmin as it gives me a few saftey feature (though I believe InFlight could replace those too).

I have an ASUS 9" laptop and a blue tooth GPS "22 and Skydemon runs perfectly on this set up

Cheers Bill Goldsmith

Am going to post my experience of Cheapo Chinese 7" WinCE device in next few days once I have actually flown with the thing and used it properly.

Looks v encouraging (also runs MemMap for those who like  charts).

David