#airplaneownership — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #airplaneownership, aggregated by home.social.
-
The main issue with just using velcro straps is going to be vibration prevention. I really don’t want this to vibrate against the center console panel. #VansAircraft #Aviation #avgeek #ExperimentalAviation #AirplaneOwnership
-
#VansAircraft came out with a fleet-wide service bulletin to install egress hammers. Kind of a no-brainer, but I’ll admit to never having thought of this (fire extinguisher yes, egress hammer, no). https://www.vansaircraft.com/service-information-and-revisions/sb-00079/
This shouldn’t be hard to comply with - Vans sells these for $25 each, and assuming they actually ship relatively quickly (big if, for real. I see these are already on backorder), the annoying part is just figuring out where and how to mount it. Might be able to rivet some velcro straps to the center console and have that be the install method?
-
Lol, like, an hour after I posted this, I got a text telling me they were finished. So… yay! Lucky me. #avgeek #aviation #ExperimentalAviation #AirplaneOwnership
-
My airplane has been in the shop for a week now. New transponder is installed and set up. During some tests, they discovered some leaks in my static system. Which… cool. Glad they’re taking care of that, even though I wish I had the plane available sooner. Also, glad they did this because I wouldn’t have known about it until conditional inspection time.
-
I tried installing this today, and it was a very humbling experience. I was able to remove the old transponder, but pulling the old mounting bracket (of course these aren’t compatible) was beyond my current toolset. It’s riveted to the panel mount bracket, and I could not access those rivets such that I could drill them out. And I certainly don’t even own proper riveting equipment to replace them when I’m done.
So I’m just going to pay someone who knows what they’re doing (and has the equipment to do this). And maybe they’ll let me observe so I can learn how to improve what maintenance I can do on this.
-
New transponder arrived! For as small as the frontal area on these things are, it’s really easy to forget how deep they are. My com/nav radio from trig is about the same dimensions.
Also, it came with a wire harness where the wires are completely unlabeled. I emailed aircraft spruce to ask for the install manual, and they replied with the 264 page install manual. I have a bunch of reading to do this weekend.
-
Apparently the uavionix echoUAT I have is failing. No idea the vintage of this unit, but the echoUAT was first released in 2017, and is now discontinued. I'd believe this is the result of an early now out-of-warranty unit having a defect. Not only has it refused a configuration update to a new tail number (long story there, I knew of this particular issue before buying, but assumed the issue could be fixed by having support reprogram it using JTAG - which didn't work), but it also periodically stops transmitting. The other day, I had an rtl-sdr with appropriate antenna literally feet away from the transponder. Running the transponder + dump1090 on a laptop for ~10 minutes, I never picked up any ads-b packets from my plane. I picked up plenty of packets from other aircraft, so I know the receiver was working. Uavionix support has directly told me that the unit is failing, and I'll believe them on this.
I absolutely did not want to have to start replacing (parts of) the panel this early into ownership. I was planning on replacing the panel at some point (Not with Garmin parts - Garmin is too rich for my blood), but not for at least another year or two. But now I'm wondering if I should do a piecewise upgrade starting now instead of an all-at-once replacement down the line. It seems that (almost?) nobody is making these UAT add-ons anymore, in favor of transponders with built-in ads-b out. I don't mind buying a used echoUAT, but a) I can't find one, and b) given how expensive aviation is, I'd rather not buy something that's discontinued given that long-term support will be questionable. My existing mode-s only transponder works perfectly fine other than the lack of ads-b out. I'd prefer not to replace an otherwise perfectly functioning unit. But if that's going to be the best option support-wise, then maybe I should just get a transponder that'll do ads-b out + a separate ads-b receiver? I've so far only found two companies that make mode s + ads-b out + ads-b in transponders: Garmin and uavionix. And neither of those offerings are appealing to me, to say the least.