jbeckley
10-19-2009, 10:22 PM
Installed the EFIS AP IV in my RV7A this last week. Installation went with out a single hitch. I replaced a Blue Mountain Lite Plus and AP system. It took twice as long to remove the Blue Mountain and autopilot than it took to install the Trutrak EFIS and servos. John and Tony over at STARK AVIONICS www.starkavionics.com sold me the unit and set me up with a nice start to the harness. I opted for the RV6 servos that install under the pilots seat rather than the wing servo because I had to remove the seat pans to remove the old servos anyway and I already had 18ga servo cables installed.
Both the pitch and roll servos took less than 1.5 hours to install combined!
Verified all cable connections and data lines to my 430W and buttoned up the plane and set out for the test flights.
Sunday was a VERY windy day up to 3500 feet then dead calm above that so I got to try out all flight conditions. Factory settings were spot on. I fiddled with most of the settings but ended up back with the factory defaults in the end.
I shot 9 approaches at a couple of local airports and while the AP did a fantastic job of flying the plane I noticed that I was over flying all of the waypoints. I realized the EFIS was only getting RS232 nav data and not Arinc429. I reconfigured the 430W Arinc 429 outputs to low speed and solved the problem of over flights. Entire flight plan and steering executed flawlessly.
Next problem I encountered was the EFIS would not go into GPSSV mode.
Could not couple to the vertical nav and to make matters worse I kept getting "Approach Downgraded" message from the 430w. These problems were most certainly coming from the 430.
I talked to Lucas today and he suggested that while I needed to set the ARINC 429 settings to low I also needed to set it to "GAMA 429".
That setting now gave the EFIS and the 430W full communications and proper annunciations.
The problem with the 430W refusing to couple to the vertical approach boiled down to a faulty GPS antenna setup. I setup a spare GA-56 antenna and 10 feet of RG-400 cable and taped that to the top of my canopy. My 430 was happy and allowed a fully coupled LPV approach. I have to rework the antenna.
I have not read many if any reviews of the EFIS AP 4 before now. I really like the voice annunciation of the different stages during the approach and also verbal warnings of any faults during AP operations. I have flown behind a wide variety of autopilots and I have to say this system is by far the best. Learning curve is about 4 approaches to become proficient. Every control it makes is silky smooth. The layout and graphics of the EFIS is efficient and easy to interpret. Menu and input control is straight foreword and makes perfect sense. Every command is only one button press away. No sub commands to cycle through. Go up- twist a knob, Go left-twist a different knob. Increase or decrease vertical speed-twist a knob. Turn on the AP or command it to couple to a flight plan on your GPS just press a single button. Every thing you might want the AP to do is one step ahead of you just waiting for you to press a button to confirm....Kudos to the designer.
The only thing I would like to see changed is the resolution of the input knobs. You have to do a lot of twisting to get a required result. Like changing the heading bug from 360 to 180 or an initial setting of the baro if way off requires a lot of twisting. This is great for turbulence but a real pain otherwise. It would be nice to rewrite the knob software to be speed sensitive. Turn knob fast = larger gain, turn knob slow= higher resolution.
This might make the knobs last longer:D
When the 429 Nav converter is released I think the EFIS and AP would be perfect.
Thanks Lucas for the extended time doing the customer service thingy you do that made this install so easy.
Both the pitch and roll servos took less than 1.5 hours to install combined!
Verified all cable connections and data lines to my 430W and buttoned up the plane and set out for the test flights.
Sunday was a VERY windy day up to 3500 feet then dead calm above that so I got to try out all flight conditions. Factory settings were spot on. I fiddled with most of the settings but ended up back with the factory defaults in the end.
I shot 9 approaches at a couple of local airports and while the AP did a fantastic job of flying the plane I noticed that I was over flying all of the waypoints. I realized the EFIS was only getting RS232 nav data and not Arinc429. I reconfigured the 430W Arinc 429 outputs to low speed and solved the problem of over flights. Entire flight plan and steering executed flawlessly.
Next problem I encountered was the EFIS would not go into GPSSV mode.
Could not couple to the vertical nav and to make matters worse I kept getting "Approach Downgraded" message from the 430w. These problems were most certainly coming from the 430.
I talked to Lucas today and he suggested that while I needed to set the ARINC 429 settings to low I also needed to set it to "GAMA 429".
That setting now gave the EFIS and the 430W full communications and proper annunciations.
The problem with the 430W refusing to couple to the vertical approach boiled down to a faulty GPS antenna setup. I setup a spare GA-56 antenna and 10 feet of RG-400 cable and taped that to the top of my canopy. My 430 was happy and allowed a fully coupled LPV approach. I have to rework the antenna.
I have not read many if any reviews of the EFIS AP 4 before now. I really like the voice annunciation of the different stages during the approach and also verbal warnings of any faults during AP operations. I have flown behind a wide variety of autopilots and I have to say this system is by far the best. Learning curve is about 4 approaches to become proficient. Every control it makes is silky smooth. The layout and graphics of the EFIS is efficient and easy to interpret. Menu and input control is straight foreword and makes perfect sense. Every command is only one button press away. No sub commands to cycle through. Go up- twist a knob, Go left-twist a different knob. Increase or decrease vertical speed-twist a knob. Turn on the AP or command it to couple to a flight plan on your GPS just press a single button. Every thing you might want the AP to do is one step ahead of you just waiting for you to press a button to confirm....Kudos to the designer.
The only thing I would like to see changed is the resolution of the input knobs. You have to do a lot of twisting to get a required result. Like changing the heading bug from 360 to 180 or an initial setting of the baro if way off requires a lot of twisting. This is great for turbulence but a real pain otherwise. It would be nice to rewrite the knob software to be speed sensitive. Turn knob fast = larger gain, turn knob slow= higher resolution.
This might make the knobs last longer:D
When the 429 Nav converter is released I think the EFIS and AP would be perfect.
Thanks Lucas for the extended time doing the customer service thingy you do that made this install so easy.