While I agree with the basic jest of all the comments made about the BMA,
I have a little different opinion about the system as a whole. I do believe
BMA was started as a personal project and grew from there, after people
urged him to make the system available to them. Kinda reminds me of the
story I heard about Van's Aircraft.
  As far as "off the self components", yes, I believe they are. I don't see
that as a bad thing.
These components were developed with multi-million investments, it doesn't
bother me in the least that I don't have to share this cost with just the
very small aviation market. These off the self components were state of the
art not too many years ago.
  It's true, you get what you pay for. I hate to poor mouth hear, but to me
10K is a hellvalota money, some people talk like this is chump change.
  For those of you who did not see the system at Oshkosh this year. The
high resolution terrain is now standard, with HITS coming very soon. All
these upgrades are available to all BMA customers for a reasonable yearly
subscription charge, that also includes the terrain and chart updates every
28 days.

Mark Lally
ES