Jay Honeck wrote:
: The radios in our plane have probably been replaced six times since 1974.
: Worse, every guy that put in a new radio seemed to string new wires, simply
: cutting off the old antenna wires. This meant that there are several
: "antenna wires to no where" under the panel -- making determining which one
: was disconnected an exercise in frustration.

I have often speculated that iffen I were clean-sheet designing a
nav/com; I would do about what ICOM did on at least one series of
VHF amateur transceivers.

There'd be a control panel, with display and controls. It has fiber
fiber back to the box under the rear seat. The control panel is say
1" deep -- it has nothing but the displays, LED's, optical spin
encoders, and a minimum of drive electronics.

This gets all the electronics of import out of the jungle oven known
as "in front of the panel" to where they can be easily wired, seen
and cooled. CG permitting, you could add a adjacent 3AH GelCell as
emergency power.

You could also do the same with GPS, xponder, etc. In fact the
panels might be the same hardware, except for labels.

Yea, I know, that's ~~what the ARINC standard used to do on DC-6
era beasts -- remote everything down to the radio bay. One issue
you add is the interconnecting wiring as failure points. But if we
use flexible fiber jumpers, instead of 18-odd wires, that's a
different kettle of fish. Further, if it loses the fiber connectivity,
the radio can revert to ?121.5? and preset volume, etc.

Now, I don't think anyone will ever do this -- for all the reasons
the GA fleet is what it is. But I still think it is a fun engineering
dream, at least.
--
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