Originally Posted by
Mayhemxpc
So the question made me curious and I looked at the manuals (on-line) for the Garmin handhelds. Curiously, the marine handhelds seem to be able to do it but the aviation ones do not mention in in the manuals.
Yes, of course you CAN plot out a SAR grid on a handheld. I used to do it for the Civil Air Patrol on my Garmin 195. It is a little tedious, that is all. You just plot each turn as a waypoint on a route. You can also, as mentioned to above, just plot your base leg and then, when you turn around the other way, maintain a cross track error according to your desired spacing. (90 knots, standard rate turn, puts you one nautical mile parallel to and in the opposite direction of the leg you just flew. That should give you a 50% chance of spotting a water buffalo from an altitude of 1000' feet (lower does not significantly improve the probability, for a variety of reasons.)
But... Why not an iPad or an AV8R or something similar? Last year's iPad plus a Dual or Bad Elf GPS is cheaper than the list price for any Garmin aviation hand-held. If you are doing SAR, you could even plot each leg of your search pattern the manual way, using Google Earth and have a nice satellite view for planning and tracking your progress.
Obviously, I remember what is was like to fly SAR, disaster assessment, and aerial recon's before we had GPS, not to mention nice glass panel mounts hooked into an autopilot that does all the work for you (although I can do that stuff, too.) If you want to take this off-line and have some serious discussions about what you want to do (thinking about your other posts on looking for a twin SAR airplane), send me an email.
Chris