The rear of the panel as it was when I bought the glider.
The rebuilt panel.
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The rear of the panel as it was when I bought the glider. |
The rebuilt panel. |
The GPS uses an active antenna, which is mounted on top of the sheet alloy cross piece to give it an unobstructed view of the sky through the glass fibre nose. The data interconnection box is in the well below the antenna with the C4's audio output mounted in the well beyond the interconnect box. If an iPAQ is substituted for the GPS II+, a blind GPS would replace the active antenna. The connector on the left of the panel receives power from the batteries. The connector for the radio microphone and speaker, mounted on a support made from 1.5mm fibreglass sheet, is just inboard of the power connector. The transmit switch is mounted on the stick. It plugs into a connector on the bottom of the panel between the internconnection box and the C4 speaker. The R.C. Allen T&S is a 28v unit. It is driven via a solid state 12v to 28v converter which is mounted to the right of the antenna support and surrounded by the cable leading to the C4's temperature sensor.
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The rebuilt panel with FLARM installed. |
As the Binatone B.350 PNA has its own internal antenna, I simply reused the original sheet alloy cross piece and the Gilsson active GPS antenna I'd used with the Garmin GPS II+ and bolted the Red Box FLARM electronics to one leg of the cross piece. Since the active antenna's cable no longer needed to reach a GPS receiver on a flexi-mount in front of the panel, I was able to shorten it considerly and hence tidy up some of the the wiring. The Red Box's transceiver dipole is mounted on an outrigger attached to the Libelle instrument tray. This allows it to be positioned midway between the instrument tray and the rudder pedals and hence to get a relatively unobstructed view back past the instruments.