Well, I wasn’t finished getting stuff, I had forgotten about the G5 and one day it just showed up. A half hour later it was in the plane. The unit at the bottom of the radio stack in picture one is the G5 not a faded picture anymore.

Picture two shows the middle of diagnosing a problem that I solved via wiring but is really a software issue. The connector in the picture feeds the position of the flap arm to the PFD from a little sensor (not visible) connected to the arm with a stiff wire. When the arm moves, it moves the wire which moves a little arm in the sensor.

One of the tricks of the fancy box I bought is that it can be programmed to know where flap stops are. So a flick of the flaps down button means go to the first stop and stop. Then another flick and it will move to the next position. Since it always knows where the flaps are at, whichever direction you push, up or down, the flaps will move to the correct up or down preset. You can hold the button to override and you can flick it mulitple times and it will continue until it has reached the position indicated by the number of flicks. Very nice.

As wired from Van’s drawing, it doesn’t work.  To be fair, the wiring of the sensor and flap drive was set by Van’s a long time ago and the GAD 27 just came out at the end of last year. There probably aren’t a whole lot of them out there yet.

The problem is this. In the setup, you move the flaps to the position you want them to be in and then assign the sensor value to that position. As you go through each position the screen plots the points on a chart. The software unfortunately and unreasonable assumes that flaps up will be a low value from the sensor and flaps down will be a higher value.  In the case of the RV 14, because of where the sensor is mounted the values are backwards, so the slope of the line is negative not positive as assumed by the software. You can get the flaps to work by pressing and holding but it will not do the neat trick of going to each stop.

There simply is no rule that says the slope must be positive, it will always be highly dependent on the best way to mount the sensor in a particular airplane. The software should easily recognize this but it doesn’t.

I solved it by rewiring the sensor so it gave the proper slope, but then the magic box will give the wrong direction to the flap motor so that has to be reversed as well.  As soon as I accomplished this it worked correctly. Hopefully a future Garmin software update will remedy this for others. For me it was a day of screwing around needlessly in tight quarters.

Next up the last two picture show the start of installing an antenna with a doubler.