Hi Steve,
I have a great 695 which I like as the screen is really great under the sun and the device has buttons and knobs which I love when I fly a bumpy ride. I cannot understand how people use their touch screen in bad weather... but this is an other topic!
I also bought a gdl39 3D, used one to get adsb in.
As I am located in France I can see the adsb equipped plane.
That works great. However we do not have uat ground stations in France. So only air to air @ 1090.
I took the 695 and gdl39 to Redhill in uk as they are running a uat trial. That worked great! NEXRAD like image on the 695, metars ... that is really cool!
And I was thinking how could we get weather in the 695 in France. I tried the garmin pilot app on an iPad, and garmin made a great app with weather ( from internet) but the iPad screen is not at all sunlight readable and it is a touchscreen , not good in my opinion.
Garmin essentially created an app which is a fis-b emulator. If only I could get that in the 695 that would be great....
Did garmin ever though about such fis-b emulator for non USA pilot? I would think about an app sending via Bluetooth the fis-b to gdl39 through one one the 4 Bluetooth channels, and the gdl39 would merge that with real traffic and send via serial wire to 695. Or a simple Bluetooth to rs232 could create a link between the phone and the 695...
For pilots flying at 3000 feet that would work with latest 4g phones. And with 5g, 6g and other coming the datalink will be better even...
Olivier.