This site in Slovenia has been around for years but has recently popped up on the forums…
He is an amazingly talented guy. Analog (fairly rare skill), digital (fairly widespread skill though less for embedded systems), RF (very rare skill).
His main site is here
Look at this radar altimeter
Great link Peter……….And you know what? If EASA allowed people to install his ground proximity detector which we could ask him to modify to say “retard; retard” …………just like a “big plane” would things be safer with this home built kit or more dangerous? I would buy it and install it just to try it out and see if it was better than me!!
I am sure most “out of currency” people have problems flaring too high and then they are “too high, too slow” and then have a heavy landing. Perhaps they ram their Aircraft into the runway I have no idea but I am massively sceptical about all of this TSO stuff. In the days of Valves perhaps TSO certification was useful. Now I am 90% sure that the biggest risk is the Pilot or EASA (i.e. the Government)…………after all this is the same “Government” that means that people fly with an I-Pad and SkyDemon on their lap. Why not say that you can screw a hinge so your I-pad can cover a few TSO’d instruments like the really useful £ 1,000 clock in a PA28 that nobody looks at?
Another example, now we have 8.33Khz spacing (except me as I am hanging on to the bitter end!!) ……….people are messing around and the extra time dialling in frequencies and during this time they are not looking out of the window!! (Thanks EASA!)
What do people think? Do the Government make us safer or not ?
Archer -181
What do people think? Do the Government make us safer or not ?
Yes. Absolutely. Certification does make aviation safer.
Certification does make us much safer. For a start, it has provided planes which can be flown by normal people because they have predictable handling, etc. In avionics, it has caused slow progress at times, but VFR and IFR comms and nav doesn’t need the latest gizmos. GPS enabled the entry of consumer gear into flying, which is great, but an Ipad running some flashy nav software doesn’t do anything which you could not do with a panel mounted certified box with crappy map data – on a properly planned flight.
At work I have to deal with the sham of ISO9000 etc so I am not going to say certification works well all the time. A lot of the time is merely creates barriers to entry; ISO9000 itself prevents small companies selling to big ones, for example. Plenty of certified aviation gear is crap. At the edges, certification of anything (including whole aircraft) can be achieved with document forgery…
I don’t think the homemade avionics in the original post would be legal in Europe today even in a homebuilt – unless the builder had the resources to get them tested for frequency accuracy, stability, harmonics, etc. They may well be perfect, in the same way one can just design and build a fully EC-EMC compliant product without any lab tests, but you need the lab tests to support it (except in the UK where due diligence is still allowed – at least in consumer and industrial sphere… yes the test labs really hate that… plus you cannot be prosecuted for not doing lab tests if the product is actually to spec).
I’m not so sure it does these days.
I fly behind an utter crap certified radio. I doubt it was cutting edge in 1974. And a replacement certified copy is going to cost me 4 grand.
The uncertified handheld in my microlight. Is simply better and a new 8.33 one will cost me 200 quid.
I could go in. My uncertified rotax is a far better engine than my certified o200.
I fly behind an utter crap certified radio. I doubt it was cutting edge in 1974. And a replacement certified copy is going to cost me 4 grand.
The key point here is 1974. What you are describing is the typical GA situation where successive owners have ignored deferred maintenance for decades and now the chickens are coming home to roost in the form of the 4k bill.
Same with every time I hear of an Annual on a simple SEP costing £10k.
The handheld in your UL is not from 1974, for sure 
Also, why have all the people who have flown with that crap radio for some decades continued to rent that plane?
The engine debate would be OT here but I think we did it before a few times
Bathman wrote:
I fly behind an utter crap certified radio. I doubt it was cutting edge in 1974. And a replacement certified copy is going to cost me 4 grand.
You should be able to get a certified radio for less than £4k (pounds or euros). My Garmin GTR225A cost half that, and is a good radio. It’s a lot better than the 90s Narco radio it replaces, but even the Narco radio wasn’t that bad – amortised over 20 years it just hasn’t cost that much.
When I bought my aircraft it had a mixture of avionics, the audio panel was the 1969 Piper original unit, the ADF was a Narco coffee grinder type with X1 720ch and X1 760ch boxes. I was among the first to install the Garmin 430 and had the FAA guy based at LHR coming to inspect the installation. 8.33 spacing is not a problem and no brainer. At the airforce our aircraft were equipped with radios that had 21 pre-set frequencies on a drum, to change a frequency the drum had to be pulled out and small beads had to be moved, the settings used to be done on the ground prior to take off. Should we stay with the “beady radios”?
Technology moves forward and so is quality.
Peter
This radar alt can be converted into a wheels up landing system. At a pre-set alt. and flying at an airspeed that is slower than X will trigger a warning that the undercarriage is still up.
I had a system like that fitted, unfortunately, it found to be unreliable due to quality.
There should be a trivially simple way, without a doubt illegal, to make a KRA10 RADALT’s DH indicator output interlock with the landing gear state, and generate a warning. I don’t know of anybody who has done it, and if somebody has they won’t be advertising it. Quite a lot of KRA10s in GA, however, even piston GA like a TB20.
However, 200ft is leaving it a bit late especially as in most planes you will still be doing 140kt if the gear is still up so even Gatwick will be too short 
