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Avionics

Buying ADS-B Now: Should You Bother?

The avionics industry gets big props for producing sophisticated, ever-more-capable products, but lately they’ve excelled at producing something else: confusion. The veritable gusher of portable ADS-B products that appeared last spring has devolved an already chaotic market into a state of utter confusion that even we have trouble sorting out. To be fair, the FAA is to blame for proposing an ADS-B system that only Rube Goldberg could love and maybe not even him. So it’s time to ask of ADS-B—as many readers are—what’s in it for me? Why should I buy this technology and when?

Paul Bertorelli
Verified

The avionics industry gets big props for producing sophisticated, ever-more-capable products, but lately they’ve excelled at producing something else: confusion.   

The veritable gusher of portable ADS-B products that appeared last spring has devolved an already chaotic market into a state of utter confusion that even we have trouble sorting out. To be fair, the FAA is to blame for proposing an ADS-B system that only Rube Goldberg could love and maybe not even him. So it’s time to ask of ADS-B—as many readers are—what’s in it for me? Why should I buy this technology and when?

Paul Bertorelli

Paul Bertorelli is Aviation Consumer’s Editor at Large. In addition to his valued contributions to Aviation Consumer, his in-depth video productions on sister publication AVweb cover a wide variety of topics that greatly contribute to safety, operation and aircraft ownership. When Paul isn’t writing or filming, he’s out flying his J3 Cub.