I’ve been a multi-year client of Avidyne for avionics in GXRP. While I have no complaints about the hardware, two times now, their sole customer support person, one Jessica Power, has emitted a repugnant air of customer disservice.

The technical background of the service dispute is simple.

Avidyne’s multi-function-display units include a transceiver to talk to Orbcomm satellites to downlink weather and uplink some basic telemetry data while in flight. They charge by the message traffic, which comes out to about $20/hour for a bad-weather IFR flight. The data transfer is pretty slow, but covers parts of Canada as well as the US, and is good enough for me. They call this the “narrowcast” service.

In addition, an optional receiver is available that receives just weather data from the XM broadcast service. XM weather data is fresher and better (since it is continuously broadcast US-nation-wide). Since it does not include Canadian information, requires extra equipment (the receiver), and a separate XM subscription, I did not purchase this option. Note that nothing extra would be purchased from Avidyne in any case – both the XM receiver and the XM subscription are purchased from other companies.

They call having both the Orbcomm transceiver and the XM receiver as the “multilink” service.

Avidyne offers a web-based system for managing the narrowcast subscription. Since last summer, this system also allowed customers to view the telemetry data, specifically recent positions/speeds of the airplane. Superimposed on a map, this allows ground-dwellers to know where GXRP has been and where it’s going. There is also a separate two-way text-messaging service available, for pilots and (say) their families or dispatchers to exchange notes.

On to the customer disservice.

The first one relates to the text messaging system. According to the myavidyne web site, and according to the installed hardware, this feature is not available without a “multilink” subscription. I sent an email to the generic inquiry address a question about why that would be. After all, the XM system does not carry text message data (and this was confirmed by Ms. Power) – it all goes over Orbcomm (the plain “narrowcast” system). She refused to give any sort of technical rationale. I asked whether it was simply a marketing constraint (intended somehow to promote the XM system), but she said no, and that they have no financial interest in it anyhow. So she claimed there was a technical reason, but simply shut the discussion down when I asked what & why. For example, would text messaging work for someone whose XM receiver fails in flight? Or one who travels outside the XM (Continental US) service area? She refused to say, and refused to find out.

The current issue relates to the web-based telemetry viewing. A few days ago, this access went away (mostly). A login screen that has worked fine for months now says “multilink subscription is required”. Since I’ve been a happy user, I’ve sent another polite email wondering what’s up with the change. The answer, from the same Jessica Power, is that this too “does require XM and 2-Way datalink communication”. But of course that is false, since I’ve been using it perfectly well for almost a year. Requests for elaboration, and indeed escalation to a higher level person at Avidyne, have so far gone unanswered.

I don’t know what to think about this company now. I don’t know if Ms. Power doesn’t know the truth, or whether she cannot share the truth. Her own claims, even taken without my own experience, suffer several points of contradiction. These emails are just surreal. They make me worry about what other service might quietly disappear, with no explanation except that perhaps I should have sent someone else money for a service I can’t use and don’t actually need.

Come on guys and gals, try to be honest with your customers.