You shouldn't be flying around low in the mountains at night.

Garmin alrerady has the WAAS upgrade. Where have you been?
"Curator"


"scott moore" wrote in message
. ..
Interesting call today. I talked to S-TEC/Meggit. I am doing my
annual and wanted to cure a longstanding issue with my S-TEC 30
autopilot.

The issue was that when dimming the unit down, when you turn the
potentiometer below a certain value, the light on the S-tec 30
goes to full bright.

The S-tec 30 has a line that connects to the panel light, but it
does not draw power from it, but rather, it uses it as a "sense"
line and dims the light to match what the rest of the panel
does.

Unfortunately, on dark nights this behavior works out so that
just when you most need to turn the panel down to the lowest
settings, the minimum panel light required, so that you can
see mountains in the dark, the light on the S-TEC 30 goes to
full bright. This leads to workarounds such as having to put
tape over the light, completely defeating its purpose.

I'd always figgured this was a problem with the way it was
connected, so I called them about fixing it. Much to my
surprise, they told me it was a "design feature". If the
panel lighting were to "short out" or otherwise turn
completely off, the S-tec unit will still show its light.

Of course, it makes complete sense. The s-tec can't be
that accurate about when it triggers this "fail safe" mode,
so its going to occur whenever the lighting is set
particularly low, which is unusual. Unfortunately, that's
just what you have to do on a moonless night to really get
your full night vision.

Its a good example of "fail safe stupid". Everyone had a
good reason for getting there, but the result is fairly
insipid. I'll probably "solve" it by permanently taping some
dark plastic film over the front of the instrument.

In any case, if the lighting on the panel really were to
fail, how having one bright "autopilot on" light in the
midst of a sea of dark gages would help escapes me right now.

Cheers,

Scott Moore

PS. Hey Garmin! Where's our 430/530 Waas upgrades!