Picked one up yesterday. The folks at the Bendix booth indicated that it would be as simple as "Buy the GPS, then take the discount coupon to the WeatherWorx folks, then buy the Weatherworx hardware. Next, get an XM plan and you're off and running." Not even close.
Bendix does not have their act together in rolling out this product. The Weatherworks guys don't have the hardware at Osh to support XM on this unit. I discovered this after buying the GPS. The Weatheworx folks were to one-day ship the hardware to Osh for me to pick-up this morning. It was a no-show. When I followed up with Weatherworx, their story was that the XM hardware (I think we're talking proprietary cables from Bendix) that interfaces with the AV80R was only delivered to the Weatherworx warehouse yesterday and wasn't available for shipment until today. So I flew home into the face of nasty weather today without XM weather.
I tried to use the AV80R to guide my trip home, and was able to program my route home with it, but used my 10 year old Lowrance 100 as primary navigation. Why? The AV80R does not ship with a manual. Only a CD with the manual on it. So I was unable to delve deeply into the system set-up, and couldn't get the unit to display airspace. Therefore, I chose against using it as primary nav on the way home.
When I did use the unit, I found the unit's display is hard to read in bright sunlight. Again, there may be a setting I couldn't find (no manual, remember?) to address this issue, but my old Lowrance was MUCH easier to read in the cockpit than the AV80R. Additionally, the system didn't display certain information I am used to seeing - Bearing and distance to the next waypoint. Again, this may be user configurable. We'll see.
I'm about to plug in the CD and see if I can figure out how to address some of these issues. If they are fixable, I may be able to get over the fact that I spent a half day of my day and a half at Osh dealing with the butchered roll-out of this product. If the issues I found are not something I can resolve through user settings, I'll be returning the unit and the Weatherworx hardware that is supposed to arrive at my home (signature required... AARGH!!) tomorrow.
1st Edit: The system manual (on the CD) contained instructions on resolving several of the issues I originally had. The airspace issue is resolved (apparently, airspace info is turned off as a default setting). As far as data displayed goes, there are 20 or so options for data windows. You can select the 9 of these you are most interested in, and put those in your desired order. Four of them will be visible at any given time and the remaining 5 (of the 9 you selected) can be reached by scrolling.
At this point, the brightness of the display may still be an issue. I am still scrolling through the 274 pages of info on the CD looking for brightness controls. Boy, I wish there was a paper manual....
Also, the standard internal battery seems to last about an hour with me scrolling through a bunch of set-up screens and the like.