MapComm shootout: GNS 480 excels: Garmin owns the market for mapcomm navigators. Of three...

The all-in-one GPS color mapcomm has become such an avionics standard that a used airplane without at least a Garmin GNS 430 hardly gets a second look. And for any owners planning an upgrade in this market, you'll likely be sending money to Garmin anyway, for it owns all three mapcomm megaboxes, the GNS 430/530 and the GNS 480, which it acquired when it bought UPSAT in 2003.

So which is best for a given airplane? There's no easy answer, but in this article, we'll summarize the major features of each. Each product does so much that we can't detail all of the operations.