Are they giving not many false alarms because they don’t give true alarms either? Or have they fixed their power amplifier design now?
I have see true alarms, and have seen a power amplifier issue only once. They also have a good monitoring circuit. It does monitor power output, power reflection, ELT coding, battery voltage and oscillator frequency. They also have some internal diagnostics using software (dealer only). Once seen on an airliner which was indicating low battery. The computer read out indicated 10 thousends of self test. When I asked the customer about it they indicated they always self-tested the ELT every flight.
The most tricky part of this is with SEP over water. Then antenna is on the wrong side of the fuselage as the aircraft will flip over. As soon as the antenna is below a few cm of water the attenuation of water will prevent the signal from reaching the sattelite.
Have installed second ELT’s on the bottom of the fuselage as well, on aircraft operation above water, due to an accident where the ELT did go off, but the signal not being received as the antenna was in the water.
For over water flight I would also recommend a PLB and a Safelink. The Safelink broadcast an AIS message indicated you need help on radar screens of most larger vessels. (AIS is the marine variant of ADS-B)
If I may, I have 2 PLBs for sale, I think that the batts. need to be replaced due to there 5 years time limit.
