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Affordable Avionics Portable Ramp Tester

its not me …it comes from the manual. see link Anyway it looks a handy box for the price. I only found three brands building a small unit like that TKM, Sunavionics and another one from Troll avionics:PALMNAV NAV/COM RAMP TESTER

Link

Last Edited by Vref at 24 Oct 19:59
EBST

One thing which is extremely useful is a continuous attenuator, from the max power (say 0dBm or whatever) down to -90 dBm.

It is invaluable for testing reception limits.

I have known a number of avionics guys with the little boxes and they are half useless, without a variable output power.

That Troll box looks good (a funny name – evidently they don’t read pilot forums ) but I don’t see the output is variable, except maybe with predefined steps.

But a continuous attenuator is hard to do. Nowadays there are clever chips for that, but you still need careful construction. It costs money. Now, how would I know this?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

It looks quite usefull to do some testing, it seems to be more usefull than the TKM / Michell NC series testers for example. Still the test that can be done are limited though.

I would think it isn’t the most usefull for owners. In my opinion it can be usefull within a group of owners, a club or a company which doesn’t have a full avionics shop. Then it can be usefull to take out some guess work. From a cost point it still wouldn’t make sense, as you will spend less on an avionics shop, and hopefully, get good advice and system knowledge there.

who threw in my TAS605 had a NAV-401 and it did just one at a time, and was so shagged it barely worked. They had to bang it to get a signal out

I wonder why did use the NAV-401, which is COM / VOR / LOC / GS / MB tester, doesn’t make to much sense, at least not too check out the TAS-605 itself. It would be ok to check if the other systems still work ok. I would test a TAS605 with a TDR, IFR-6000 (with traffic option) and a pitot static tester. If you or your shop uses less equipment they are cutting corners.

I can borrow the services of the IFR4000 guy for about 20-40 quid. The service is so valuable that I pay him in multiples of £20 and it is still very very cheap.

That is good value for money, you will not get anywhere near with owning a IFR4000.

The AV-10 looks good for that price.

It does, if limitations are understand, as the manual describes. You can not compare this to a IFR-4000/IFR-6000 either on usefullness of price. The AV-10 seems a nice bit of kit for some basic troubleshooting. The calibration of a single IFR-4000 or IFR-6000 exceeds the cost of the AV-10.

One thing which is extremely useful is a continuous attenuator,

This is a vary valid argument, most units will not generated a calibrated output, nor have the possibility to attenuate. An external attenuator can be usefull, but only when the exact output is known. I wonder if the AV-10 does 0.25 mW on ALL frequencies.

JP-Avionics
EHMZ

I wonder why did use the NAV-401, which is COM / VOR / LOC / GS / MB tester, doesn’t make to much sense, at least not too check out the TAS-605 itself

I asked for a radio check because they did a lot of messing around with cables etc, and I could see from early on that a lot of stuff was being bodged.

Despite being an Avidyne dealer, they did not have any equipment for checking out the TAS installation. All they could do was to roll it outside the hangar and see if it picks up the traffic at the airport. I later spoke to Avidyne and they confirmed that an Avidyne TAS authorised dealer does not need to have any test equipment.

I haven’t yet seen any “cheap” avionics tester which has a reasonably variable output attenuator. The IFR products are too old to use those chips so they will be doing it using the old Marconi-patented (patents filed 1992 so now expired) method of forward and reverse biased diodes, which is a huge pile of components and it all needs masses of tweaks in software, to compensate the variable loss over frequency etc.

As with so much in GA, the argument for having your own kit is really an argument over the cost of downtime and hassle and who has got you over a barrel. Many/most owners do not have anybody at their base, or have nobody who is any good, many have a running or past dispute with whoever is there so can’t use them (e.g. I was not able to fly my plane to Air Touring at Biggin Hill between about 2004 and when they went bust about 5 years later, due to a £2000 dispute over “warranty” work which they billed me for) and when I look around I see the majority of owners not using an apparently capable based company for maintenance, for whatever reason(s). And when you get to less common stuff like say the KFC225 autopilot, there is just 1 company in the UK which can touch it, and they have various issues as well. GA is full of people strategically avoiding companies all over the place, so people unsurprisingly like to acquire their own capability to just do a quick test or a quick fix on something… Not really a pleasant thing to write about, and one of the joys of aircraft ownership. It’s all about putting together a team of people who you know are good and who are reasonably available.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

That is strange… Normally every manufacturer requires the correct tools. However the checks on these might be limited.

They (Avidyne) do require you have to correct tools now though.

JP-Avionics
EHMZ

It was in April 2014, at EDNY, where the Avidyne rep told me no test equipment was required for a TAS installer.

Maybe it has changed since.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

If that was the case then they still couldn’t do the installation in accordance with the installation manual, as the installation manual gives a list of some very minimal test equipment that would be required to do the checkout.

JP-Avionics
EHMZ

That reminds me of stormscope installations. The dealer just plugs in a hair dryer and positions it at various positions around the aircraft and checks if the sparks from the motor are picked up.

That reminds me of stormscope installations.

Last time I witnessed a portable drilling machine was used for this precision test In fact a great showcase for the bad distance calculation of these systems…

www.ing-golze.de
EDAZ

Dear Members

Did anyone use Sun Avionics Ramp Tester AV-17 ? Its cost is very low compared with IFR Testers IFR 4000 & 6000.
Want to know if anyone having experience in using it ?

Ven
College of Aviation Technology

VEN
Kuwait
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