I've got a Nav 122, and I've used Narco to repair it. I honeslty don't know
where the bad rep comes from, the 122 is a solid unit and I've only had good
experiences with Narco. My 122 has been to Narco twice. Once in 1996 when it
was intermittently losing the localizer. It turned out to be a cracked
resistor. That fix was actually two trips to Narco. The first trip, they
only saw the problem briefly and after cleaning up the unit and recalibrating
it could not reproduce it. After getting it back in the plane, it got more
intermittent so it went back. Narco had the unit a total of 8 days including
time in shipping. It was 11 days from when I first took it out till I had it
back in and working, and a grand total of $152 to fix. There was no charge on
the second trip because once they see it, the whole unit goes under warranty.
The second time was summer 2003 for a PROM that had gone bad after an
alternator overvoltage. The symptom in that case was no localizer on
frequencies that ended with .9x and no glide slope on two frequencies (don't
recall which ones now). Took them about six weeks and cost me $225. My usual
avionics shop told me it wasn't worth repairing and convinced me to replace it
with a KX155/KI209. I figured I would send it to Narco for their $90 eval
(they'll eval a unit for $90 and then call you to see if you want to repair
it, and the $90 is applied to the repair) to see if it could be resurrected to
give me a second glideslope. It is back in my airplane now. I've noticed
that it is noticibly more sensitive than the KX155 for picking up VORs as well
as localizers. Shop measured it to be about 11db more sensitive. The only
thing I like better about the kx155 is the digital flip-flop which allows you
to set up a second frequency ahead of time. One of the nice things about the
122 is that it will cost you next to nothing to get it installed. It is
all-in-one and goes in a standard 3.5" round hole. You just have to hook up
power, audio panel, and the antennas. Oh, it also has a marker beacon
recevier built in if you don't have one in your audio panel. For about $2200
you could have a Narco rebuild installed.

I did my primary instruction and part of my instrument in a BE-77 (beech
skipper) that had a single KX-170 nav-com with no glideslope or markers but
was IFR certified. The cert was OK for picking up an emergency IFR clearance
to get you on the ground, but that's about it. It would be next to reckless
launching off into IFR with such a minimal panel. You can't shoot an ILS with
it (you can do a localizer only approach though), and identifying
intersections requires retuning the NAV and turning the OBS. That is a
prescription for disaster when shooting an approach in worse than anticipated
weather, especially as a low time instrument pilot. The fact that you don't
intend to fly much if any IFR with it should underline that concern. At an
absolute bare minimum, you should have at least something with a digital
flip-flop NAV/COM so that you can set it up to identify intersections and also
to set up your tower/departure frequencies ahead. Even that, is probably
going to be too little when the chips are down. Put the Narco 122 in, that'll
give you a full ILS capability in one instrument, and your existing Nav/comm
will still be there to help with identifying intersections. If your comm is
not a digital flip-flop, you should probably also consider a second comm. I
think this approach will get you a minimal IFR capability for less than the
cost of getting an IFR install on the GX-300





Paul Folbrecht wrote:

I seriously considered this advice and looked into the NAV 122. I
talked to a friend of mine and the local avionics shop and they both
told me that Narco has a bad rep for service and gouges you badly to fix
a 122 - and they do break.

As others have pointed out, you don't need a heck of a lot more to make
the plane legal for IFR training/flight. Here's what __I'd__ do if I
were you. I'd sell the 300XL (since you got it for a steal, you should
at least get your money back) and buy a used NARCO NAV-122A on Ebay.
You can get a yellow tagged one for about $1300. This is the ONLY piece
of equipment you will need to be able to fly IFR legally - it's a VOR,
LOC, GS, MKR and CDI all in one 3 1/8" hole. You can then legally do
ILS, LOC, and VOR approaches.

I did exactly this in order to make my COZY MKIV IFR capable (for
training purposes and light IFR). Even if you have to pay someone $500
to install it, it's still the cheapest way there, using the least panel
space.


--
--Ray Andraka, P.E.
President, the Andraka Consulting Group, Inc.
401/884-7930 Fax 401/884-7950
email
http://www.andraka.com

"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, 1759