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Two Garmins in the stack: realizing a tangible gain from a pair of GPS navigators means organizing your resources and customizing what you see when.

Article Excerpt
I remember my first flight in a Cirrus SR20 in 1999: After years of hunting around in the clouds with two VORs and the occasional luxury of a borrowed, portable GPS (with the Atarivision black-pixel map common at the time), having two GPS navigators and a nine-inch-wide moving map was almost an obscene luxury.

It's still is a luxury, but a more common one these days. Especially with WAAS GPS making stand-alone VORs nearly obsolete, two IFR GPSs--most often, two Garmins--are becoming the standard if you don't have a full-glass panel.

There are really two ways to handle a panel like this: Fly with one GPS doing all the work and the other ready as a spare; or to make the most of all that screen real-estate. I prefer the latter.

Do You Have an MFD?

If you have a dedicated MFD, such as with a Cirrus or Columbia Avidyne Entegra/GNS 430 combo, then that figures into the picture. Moving map and weather displays work best on the big MFD (with one caveat that we'll get to in a minute). This frees the Garmins to show other information, such as flight plans or traffic.

In practice, this often means having the primary (upper or GPS 1) show the moving map (Nay 2 page) when you don't have an MFD, or having the default Nav page (Nav 1 page) visible when the MFD is showing you a...

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