We spent a lot of time planning our panel. We made a myriad of iterations on a panel starting with Van's all steam gauge panel, but gradually moving toward the newer 'glass' cockpit options. You can see our final panel in the picture. Thie panel is centered around a new combined EFIS (Electronic Flight Information System) and EMS (Engine Monitoring System) being supplied by Advanced Flight Instruments (see www.advanced-control-systems.com). Their unit is the display on the left side of the panel. Since we are VFR only, we have opted for no backup instruments for this system which minimizes the panel space requirements.Another area of much discussion was the GPS moving map display. We looked at handhelds and panel mounted units and concluded that the AvMap EKP-IV had the best (and largest) display (it's the unit with the yellow display in the middle of the panel). This is a hand held unit, but we obtained a panel mount for it (see www.AirGizmos.com) and will hard wire it into our panel. It doesn't have the weather display capability and that is a limitation we plan to live with.Our switches and breakers are at the bottom center of the panel and we elected to have lexan markings made for these switches/breakers to give a 'finished' look to the panel.The comm radio and transponder are Garmin products and are mounted just below the single axis autopilot (the round dial at the top of the panel). We debated on adding the autopilot, but felt this would be a good addition for long trips or indadvertent adventures into clouds.And finally on the far right is the standard Van's mapbox to keep our VFR sectionals in. We had plenty of space for this, so thought it would be a good addition to the panel.
