On Sat, 02 Jan 2021 05:10:42 -0800, Domenico Bosco wrote:

My glider is equipped with a quite old Becker box. The microphone cable
is in very bad conditions and i have a bunch of cables going back and
forth from the panel to the box, which is fixed close to my right
shoulder behind the seat. I'm wondering if this is really necessary, or
if i should go for a much cleaner setup with just the microphone cables
and the ptt cables starting from the radio and that's it. Is there any
good reason to keep the Becker box, and refurbish all the connection
cables?
Thanks for any advice.

I have a KRT2 in my (removable) panel: I fly a Libelle, which has nice,
slide-out panel.

The KRT2 routes all connections through a single D15, so I ran the PTT
wires out to a socket in the panel baseplate - this connects to the PTT
switch on the stick with a screw-on two-pin plug. Similarly, a length of
dual coax leaves the panel via a 4 wire screw-on connector inside its
rear right corner and terminates in a junction box on the cockpit wall
containing the speaker and with a gooseneck mic mounted on it. Does what
I want: the wiring is quite tidy and, most important, is easy to connect
and disconnect when the panel is brought home for the winter.

IME time spent tidying up the wiring and arranging it so that both the
wiring harness and the instruments connected to it can be removed and
refitted without cutting or (un)soldering anything is never time wasted.
XLR connectors [1] work well for battery connections and circular multi-
pin connectors with screw-on retaining collars work well for just about
everything else.

I never run connections directly between interconnected instruments:
instead I fit a D-series plug to the end of each cable. I have a metal
box, with matching LABELLED D-series sockets mounted on holes cut in its
lid, one for each instrument connecting cable. Inside the box, the
interconnection are made by soldering colour-coded wiring between the D-
series sockets on the inside of the box lid. Wire colours are consistent
and meaningful: black=ground, red=+12v, green=GPS data,...

This makes the wiring neat, near-impossible to damage and self-
documenting, so any rewiring thats needed if/when you replace an
instrument becomes very easy to do.

[1] the XLR connector that connects both batteries to my panel has a
right-angle cable entry. It and didn't like being kicked or knocked,
which caused momentary disconnects, but when I soldered a 5 ohm wire
wound resistor in series with a 1000uF electrolytic capacitor across each
pair of battery leads that problem vanished: the electrolytic can source
up to 5 amps briefly (safety measure and reduces the surge on connecting
the battery) and the capacitor holds enough charge to power the
instruments through the momentary disconnection if I knock the
connector.


--
--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org