But I upgraded and now traffic drops all the time, datalink errors are frequent, and a big irritant, everytime you join the network on a connected device to use foreflight, you have to hit "cancel."  If you hit foreflight mode then you have to reconfigure the Avidyne.

This is ridiculous. I take from multiple forum postings I'm not alone.  

Avidyne, you fixing this most basic functonality?  Having traffic disappear is huge safety issue.

What are you using for traffic?  Stratus?

I bought Avidyne because they advertised they could injest traffic from a Stratus.  That's a false statement.  Since installing, I've been lucky to get traffic about 20% of the attempts and even then I have to cycle Open ADSB off then on every 20 minutes or so to keep the traffic.

The past 6 flights, I've had zero luck getting traffic on my 540.

The only reason I bought Avidyne over Garmin was their claim of getting traffic from my already installed Stratus.  I completely regret buying Avidyne - I should have gone with Garmin.

I fly two different aircraft, one of which has a transponder with ADS-B IN & OUT, the other is ADS-B OUT only.

When I chose the transponder that had ADS-B in, I was very cautious to make sure I got a unit that generated GDL-90 not GDL-89 as I purposely did not want to be locked into Garmin and their ecosystem.  Their stuff is nice but I think their ability to play nicely with others leaves a lot to be desired, plus their user interface is just "OK" not great but to each their own.  In this aircraft I have no problems displaying traffic from this unit, however it is a certified source and the data is received via a serial connection behind the panel, and not via Wi-Fi.

The other aircraft I fly has ADS-B out only so for ADS-B in I put together a StratuX device using a Raspberry Pi.  The StratuX is GDL-90 and will talk to the IFD with no issue and will talk to Foreflight as well as every other EFB out on the market that I'm aware of.  Prior to Covid you could build a complete StratuX unit for about $140 and about an hour of time, not sure what the parts cost now.

The problem with the StratuS is the unit prior to version 3 was specifically designed to work with Foreflight and Foreflight alone, later on with version 3 and later they offered the ability to connect to other devices utilizing "open mode" aka "GDL-90", the problem is anytime Foreflight connects to the StratuS it wants to put the unit back into Foreflight mode.  This is a problem between Foreflight and the StratuS and although it causes issues for the IFD the problem is not the IFD.

Another comment as I don't know what else is in your aircraft, I have found that having two or more separate Wi-Fi networks in the airplane (separate meaning two or more SSID names) you will have issues if both networks are using the same Wi-Fi channel.  The Wi-Fi channel used is controlled by the device creating the network, not by the clients.

-PA

A Skytrax 200 only costs slightly more than a Stratus and with it, everything works perfectly every time, as you would expect from a hard wired, certified piece of hardware. With the Skytrax installed, you not only get ADSB weather and traffic on the IFD, the IFD outputs it to Foreflight via wi-fi.

Rolfe

Good money after bad....$2500 for SkyTrax and another $2500 to install it.

My phone running Foreflight has no problems staying connected to the Stratus' traffic.  If the phone can, then the IFD should be able to.

As of 10.3, however, weather works for 5-15 minutes and then a "Datalink Fault" message is shown, which means that some kind of internal failure has occurred weather is no longer available.   The only solution is to restart the IFD, but then it's just another few minutes until "Datalink Fault" is displayed again.

The inability to configure the FLTA exclusion areas off because of certification concerns is also unfortunate; 10.2 was very usable in this regard but 10.3 makes airports inside those FLTAs hard to see.   And sure, it can be turned off, but that setting isn't retained across power cycles.

The flip side of this is stratus (and dynon, etc.) aren't held to the same standard with respect to certification.   Dynon has been touting that the lack of ability of the IFD540 to display weather and traffic was Avidyne's fault, for example, but it's been shown that it is in fact Dynon who doesn't implement GDL90 as they have claimed.   Foreflight would have a hard time distinguishing between no traffic in the area and the Dynon not sending traffic information because of this, but the IFD ignores it (correctly so, in my opinion) because there isn't a deterministic mechanism available to make the aforementioned distinction.   

I've gone from avid proponent of the IFD540 to neutral.   I'm really not a fan of the other big avionics vendor, but I don't know that I wouldn't install one of their devices instead of the IFD if I had to do it over again.   Thinking about an upgrade to a 550 vs. the competition, it's a pretty tough choice at this point.   

It is also for this reason that I've more or less ruled out the Avidyne ADS-B solution.   In fact, this year at Oshkosh, I stopped at the Avidyne booth and asked about the SkyTrax receiver and the two reps I talked to there said they'd never heard of it and that Avidyne didn't have an ADS-B receiver product.  They suggested I build a stratux box instead.   Not confidence inspiring...

Are you sure you were talking to an Avidyne employee?  If so then maybe somebody needs some additional training.  Keep in mind  I believe Avidyne brings in pilots to help demonstrate the IFD at OSH and it is very possible that is who you were talking to.

Avidyne has their own SkyTrax units and they are the distributor of the L3 Lynx NGT-9000.

Well, they had an Avidyne shirt on and were answering questions for other folks.   Either way, it was pretty strange.

But it did solidify my decision to not pursue an Avidyne solution for weather and traffic on my IFD.     I've since figured out how to get Dynon traffic and weather on my IFD and that's a short term solution.   Not sure what long term looks like yet.