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#11
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How to be safely stupid
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! |
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