Garmin GDL-69 weather link receiver

The Garmin GDL 69 weather receiver is a remote box that will feed ground based weather information to your aircraft. This information will then be displayed on your Garmin GNS-430/530 screen. This is a "pay for" service and requires a monthly subscription (see details below).

The weather products that are available are Nexrad radar images, text metars, graphical metars, position reports. You will request which weather product you want (i.e. metar/nexrad) then the system will download the information. The download time will depend on the satellite availability. The metars are the quickest and will take about 2 minutes, the nexrad images will be longer. Once the data is downloaded, it is stored in the Garmin 430/530 for viewing.

*Note this product will require the customer to subscribe to the XM Weather.

The GDL-69 receiver is mounted in the rear of the aircraft. The unit is about 12" x 4" x 2". The GDL 69 does require an additional antenna to be mounted on the aircraft. The antenna looks like a standard teardrop GPS antenna, and is mounted on the top of the aircraft.

(left hand picture) From nav page 1 or 2 you hit the "menu" key and highlight "Request Metar", or "Request Nextrad". This will send a command to the GDL-69 to get the weather product. The right hand picture is nav page 4. Here you can access the data link directly (to check if a weather transfer is in progress, or if it arrived successfully).

Here I requested a graphical metar. The left picture is nav page 1, the right picture is nav page 4 with the graphical metars for a 50nm radius of your aircraft. On the left the airport is RDG. From nav page 2, I put the cursor over Reading, and the small box pops up. The three weather symbols indicate (at Reading) then conditions. The left most symbol indicates VFR visibility (because the symbol is green), Ceilings are MVFR (because the vertical line is a green outline but not solid green). The center symbol is temp/dew point spread. Here it is between 0-6 deg spread. The right symbol is winds. The winds are out of the S at 0-5 knots.