Syride at the Coupe Icare 2017

We recently published a full review of the Syride SYS'Nav V3, from which you may have gleaned that I’m a huge fan of Syride instruments.

Plus the SYS'Evolution is being covered for Flybubble in a full review soon to be published, so this article is just a quick update on this instrument from Syride.

Syride SYS'Evolution

SYS'Evolution - One of the most exciting features of the SYS'Evolution demonstrated to us in St Hilaire was a feature which Syride call ‘augmented reality’.

One of the other great features is the 3D display of waypoint cylinders, giving a 3D view of your target turn point, overlaid on the topography map.

Augmented reality really helps with intuitive navigation and the next feature to arrive soon will be a 3D presentation of airspace. Having personally fallen foul of airspace boundaries a couple of times this season, this innovation can’t come soon enough for me and might just be enough to have me switch from the Kobo I’ve grown used to.

Syride say:

‘Seeing the world in 3 dimensions on your flight instrument gives great advantages. It is the easiest and more comprehensive way to:

  • get out of clouds without hitting a hill
  • estimate your position to airspaces
  • optimize your route in a contest
  • confirm your glide ratio and landing point.’

We say: Useful features to say the least, the SYS'Evolution also offers the 'traditional' plan view, as well as an excellent cross-section view of the terrain, indicating as noted above both turn point cylincders and airspace as well as the glide path, thus offering pilots unprecedented in-flight situational awareness.

Another interesting feature is in the introduction of a new 6 inch E-ink touch screen on the SYS'Evolution. In the proprietary freeflight instrument market (not including Kobo readers and their ilk), Syride were the first major manufacturer to use E-ink technology.

This has a few advantages:

  • The screen is readable regardless of viewing angle and incident light, in fact the sunnier the better;
  • As the touchscreen is 'resistive' (rather than 'capacitive') you can use it's functions with normal gloves;
  • Plus, you can wear polarized glasses.

Syride say:

‘We’ve chosen the 3rd generation of E-ink screen, called « CARTA ». It’s a new kind of E-ink screen which has 50% increased contrast and 20% reduced reflections compared to the previous generations. It has the best contrast ratio ever we can find on this kind of screen, while keeping power consumption at a very low level. While flying, you read information like they were written on a paper!’

We say – it just works.

Lastly, the SYS'Evolution is also the first freeflight instrument in the world to embed a Multi-GNSS GPS chip which is able to receive satellites from several constellations (i.e: GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo) simultaneously, giving an extraordinarily accurate positional reading and reliable GPS coverage.

This combined with the fact that it's delivered with a world road map, world airspaces (updatable) and world topography also make the SYS'Evolution a very interesting  in-flight navigation instrument.

Find out more about the Syride SYS'Evolution