Finally, a Chance to Fly it!
Well, the weather finally cleared up enough to go flying this afternoon, so I have had my first airborne experience with the terrain. Really looks nice (not as nice as the shots posted by VyKing, so not much reason to post new ones of Galveston Bay...). Because it is so flat around here, I generally saw all red, then all yellow, then all green...but the shoreline of Galveston Bay showed up in blue very nicely! Also, as I would fly through transition altitudes, river gullies would show up, so I can tell the granularity is there, and pretty good. All in all, quite amazing to have this in my airplane!
I did install an adapter and compact Flash card in my other DU, so now both are fully equipped. I installed the Northwest Quadrant (17 Megs) in one, and the 48 States (5 Megs) in the other, to see if I could tell any difference. First, boot-up and AHRS alignment time is not affected at all, so no worries that terrain will slow you down getting off. If you call up the Map page right away, you will see "Terrain - loading", and then "OK" when it is done. This was complete on both units before I had lined everything up for engine start, so again - no worries with loading time. I saw no significant difference between loading times for the two databases, so probably there is no reason not to put the big one in both units.
Also of trivial interest, before I installed the NW Terrain card in the DU, I put the adapter and CF card in my laptop and copied the terrain file (properly named) using Windows Explorer. I then put it into the DU. It booted right up and found the file, so you can save yourself the step of letting the DU copy it from a Thumb drive if you want. Apparently, the DU's read the DOS/Windows file formats directly, without conversion.
All this, and you can't beat the price, again - FREE Upgrades!!!
Paul