Bart,


We have a Garmin 320A which is a few years old now but has worked flawlessly. The 320a is all solid state without the old cavity tube used in earlier generation transponders.



I originally paired this with an Ameri King encoder, which failed miserably and is a complete POS - apparently I got the ameri king unit which was built after the company started substituting fake/cheap components which were not compliant with its approval.


On a related issue, we also installed the echo UAT ADS-B unit with a WAAS which pings off the transponder antenna for mode C data without any complicated wiring.


Also purchased an iFLY 740-b GPS at a different time than when we got the echo uat and was pleasantly surprised that the iFly wified directly into the echo UAT to provide on screen traffic and weather without any additional hardware, software and no subscriptions.

The final result of having the Garmin transponder, a functioning encoder, the IFLY GPS and the Echo UAT is that I found myself entering the 21 century (maybe around the year 2010) with a 2020 ADS-B compliant system with both in and out on top of the GPS NAV.


The whole business is about as cheap as a person could expect, and it works fine.