Gump,
I have the exact same problem with my 196 in the Seattle area, drives me batty. Just as I'm ensuring I haven't penetrated the floor of Class B airspace, wammo, blinks out. It's bad enough that I don't dare navigate w/o a sectional glued to my hand, used as primary, terrain association as secondary, and the dang GPS as backup of the data my mind has already empirically collected.

Might try Mike's idea IVO the airport.
Tedd

TGoth wrote:Might try Mike's idea IVO the airport.

Me too. Next Phoenix trip the ELT's gonna be left on the hangar floor, and we'll see what happens with the GPS. It always fails at the exact same spot, and I figured something ground based was blasting the GPS unit itself, or was making the nav/com do weird shit which in turn messed up the Garmin.

Gump

When it gives you the .4 miles off, according to the last ones I've seen and fixed, it is because the pilot somehow, in the sub-menus, managed to turn the overflight / lock to nearest airport proximity down to 0.0 miles - so the GPS wouldn't tell him he was at the airport unless he overflew the exact GPS coordinate at the center of the airport.

The blue ring is a separate proximity option, which I've seen occasionally appear on a GPS - usually after someone who doesn't know what they're doing but wants to explore _all_ the submenus has been playing with it. No, I don't remember how to turn it off at the moment. It's 3:30 in the morning, my leg is killing me, and I'm going back to bed when the painkillers kick in.

I'll poke at the GPS tomorrow - okay, later today - and try to post a walkthrough of how to turn them off and reset to default options without clearing all your user data.

edited to add: in both cases, the pilots had no clue how they'd managed to do that. Makes me suspect a keyboard shortcut not advertised, and the GPS got leaned on, or bumped in a bag.

Mike worries me. I think he is a spook

Hey Mike, you didn't used to work somewhere that had a Raven as their logo did you?

Okay, on the map page, hit the "menu" button, select "set up map". hit "enter".

The blue circle around your airplane is probably your accuracy circle (Does it go away if you zoom pretty far out? if yes, then it's the proximity circle.). On the "general" tab, go down to "accuracy circle". When it's hightlighted, hit "enter" to bring up the pulldown menu. Select "off."

The other issue is that you're not registering the proximity of waypoints. So, go from the "general" tab to the "waypoints" tab. set "proximity circles" to "auto". That's the most common fix to the most common way it gets mixed up.

If either fix doesn't work, then the problem you are having is not the problem I think you are having. We can play twenty questions on the thread for the less-common problems that are similar, and get it fixed.