G1000 MFD no Terrain

[Leesommer]

I'm a newbie to this site as I'm on new diamond owner 899 DS.. just got in January and learning all the nuances. One of the things I'm finding is I just updated my Garmin database. And for some reason I'm getting sporadic MFD showing of terrain.. the PFD and MFD have the same information on their cards. I do see Terrain in the inset on the PFD window but it seems all dark on the MFD. Any similar issues out there please let me know. I'm looking forward to Flying a lot this year.

[Rick]

Hi Lee. Congrats on your new DA40, and welcome to the forum!

Is it possible that you simply turned off the terrain display on the MFD? Under the MAP button, there is a selection to enable/disable the Terrain display. If that is not pushed, you will just see black. Also, you can't have both terrain and nexrad showing at the same time, so if you press the NEXRAD button, it will automatically de-select the TERRAIN button. I'm guessing it's just turned off.

Also, there is a Terrain page on the MFD - in the first group, maybe the 4th or 5th page over. If you don't see any Terrain on the main MFD page, do you still see it on the Terrain page? I've never heard of any problems with the terrain not displaying, assuming it's loaded correctly.

[Leesommer]

Thanks Rick for your reply. After numerous calls to Garmin they suggested that the MFD card may be defective this I found very suspicious. I went through and I reformatted the PFD and MFD card and I selected the default sectors on the card. And reformatted both cards not using the quick format method. And then it seemed like the cards matched.
Meaning the remaining empty space after reformatting was the same on both cards. It did not match in the previous two times I tried to reformat the card using the quick format method.

Once I loaded the 6 items that I wanted on each card. It seemed to work so I think it was all along a bad MSD card format or maybe the card is going bad. I also had the pleasure of speaking with Randy Cox at West Wind avionics at Bay Bridge Airport. He was really knowledgeable.

[pietromarx]

I had a bad file on an SD card (FliteCharts on the MFD) the other day and it eventually took all mapping away on the MFD. The SVT eventually disappeared on the PFD, too, as we flew away from the origination airport. The SVT came back a few miles away on the return trip. Strange behavior considering it was presumably just an issue with the charts, not terrain or any other data.

I replaced the SD card on the MFD and everything was normal on the next flight.