Two companies (Avidyne & Ryan) whose pricy avionics entertain in GXRP’s cockpit have merged the other day. The most interesting part of this is the pricing of the combined product line.

GXRP’s traffic system is what used to be called “Ryan 9900BX”, an active transponder interrogation based sensor, costing something like US$20K at the time. This product’s “smaller brother” featured only passive sensing of transponders, meaning less utility outside radar coverage.

But now, Avidyne has decided to continue selling only active version of the product, but forked it into three variants (“TAS 600, 610, 620”). In an act of marketing chutzpah, the lowest one is priced at just $10K, and differs only in traffic display range. The model equivalent to the old 9900BX is the 620, still around $20K.

My best guess is that the hardware is actually identical among all the new variants, but a few lines of the software were changed to impose the differentiating constraint. PC software vendors rarely get away with this kind of trickery, but I guess avionics is a different business. People are reticent to patch back in functionality that was hobbled for purely marketing/pricing reasons.