Whilst it's great that these charts are now available, an annual VFR subscription for my Aera 660 will cover the following:
Navigation Data, SafeTaxi, IFR/VFR Charts, Airport Directory, FliteCharts, Terrain
TOTAL: AU$385 per year. Not a bad little earner for a AU$1200 device.
Alternatively, if you purchased AVPLAN-EFB for your favourite mobile device, you get all that the Garmin device offers plus live flight tracking and ADSB:
AUD$ 109
VFR & IFR Charts and ERSA
Full flight planning
ADSB In
AvPlan Live flight tracking
Full NAIPS support
AvPlan Cloud Support
https://www.avplan-efb.com/shop/australian-subscriptions/
It also allows you to use this on 3 devices per subscription. Reading the FlyGarmin website as it currently stands, it appears that I have to purchase the AU$385 package for two devices if I want any level of redundancy in the cockpit, so AU$770 per year vs AU$109
Looks like we've still got some way to go.
I could understand that this data could be prohibitively expensive if it was something that had (A) never been done before or (B) wasn't already data paid for by us through our fuel taxes and freely available in PDF form on the internet, but it has been available for a while from Dynon, Aus Runways and AVPLAN at reasonable prices and it's freely available in PDF form from the government website. I just find it a little difficult to stump up an amount of money equivalent to approximately half my annual fuel bill for something that really has a market price of $109.
The free charts and associated data is available here:
http://www.airservicesaustralia.com/aip/aip.asp?pg=60&vdate=08NOV2018&ver=1
I paid a little more to install Garmin equipment on the front end, and really appreciate the clear concise documentation and felt that it was worth the investment. I just didn't think I would be so taken advantage of on the backend. I do feel a total fool for this, and shouldn't have got so immersed in the technical integration aspects and thought instead about databases during operation, but I didn't and I'm paying the price. Hopefully however we can see some reasonable database update costing numbers coming out of Garmin in the future so that I'm not the only builder around me with Garmin equipment installed.
Regards,
Tom.