Skybound writer has slots for standard Garmin and PCMCIA cards. Revision takes under 10 minutes. The datawriter is small enough to be carried while traveling.

Two decades ago, when the internet was still a DOD geek fest, Stewart Brand opined that “information wants to be free.” He couldn’t have been thinking about navigation data revisions for GPS units, however, which are anything but. Nor are they particularly convenient to keep up to date.

Jeppesen’s latest effort at addressing this dilemma is the Skybound USB-based datawriter, a follow-on and improved version of the company’s original card burning product which appeared about five years ago. That product earned mixed reviews by buyers because it was quirky to install and required different hardware, depending on the type of GPS you had. Further, Jeppesen has streamlined the data download process…