Anyone else looking at these Stratus ESG Ads-B Out All in One units?
I am - I fly to Canada and the Bahamas on occasion, so am interested in 1090 rather than 978/UAT for ADS-B out. I have Garmin 430s (non-WAAS) and Garmin 327 transponder, so the cheapest route for me, prior to this Appareo announcement, would be either to upgrade a 430 or two and buy a 330-es (which I think would be about $7000-$10000 in parts only depending on whether I upgrade both 430s), or to go with the L-3 Lynx 1090 solution, which is also in the $6000-7000 range [parts only].
So this $3450 solution from Appareo is attractive to me, even though I don't use a Stratus or Foreflight.
Of course none of the $$$ I mentioned above includes installation, but this Appareo solution seems to be, by far, the cheapest way so far for those of us without WAAS navigators to get to 1090-out.
Looks like they're not going to be certified and shipping until late this year, though, which means we still have Sun N Fun and Oshkosh to see if any other similar products are announced.
One concern I have is that Appareo doesn't have any experience building transponders, panel-mount avionics, or certified avionics in general. So will certification get bogged down? Will they have service & support issues? Reliability / heat issues (transponders put out a lot of power so can get hot pretty quickly), etc.?