Speaking as someone who is presently working on producing “study level” Garmin instruments, I think the idea here is to develop high quality instruments that don’t require communication with the real Garmin trainers. Forwarding data in and out of the Garmin trainer itself is enormously limiting, as an architecture:
- The trainer DB is hard to update (for some trainers not possible) and doesn’t sync with the sim nav data
- The trainers themselves have a number of bugs and love to crash (NXi trainer, I’m looking at you)
- Getting access to the trainers is difficult (or impossible, for some units) and sometimes the trainers are out of date compared to the actual plane installs or have wrong options
- The performance of the trainers is not always very good compared to what can be achieved with good code in the sim
If folks want to make really awesome GPS units without compromises, I would definitely recommend avoiding the external trainer approach. But that’s just my opinion, of course, folks are always totally free to disagree.
-Matt | Working Title