Skyview Avionics Installation, Part 1

I have to admin to a great deal of trepidation at the outset of the avionics installation.  To put it mildly, electronics has always been a struggle for me.  Much to my surprise (so far at least, which isn't very far), the initial installation tasks have been quite trivial.  The theme would best be described as "plug and play."

There have been some manufacturing requirements of a minor nature and I'll probably spend more time covering those because plugging a connector of a wiring harness into a black box is not too exciting.  With that note, I'll begin with the installation of the skin stiffener of the upper tailcone, where the ADAHARS magic box lives.

The shot below is the stiffener that Van's now includes in the Skyview Avionics subkit.  A number of builders/flyers reported intermittent errors from their EFIS/ADAHRS which were traced to possible excessive vibration of the unit during certain phases of flight.  The stiffener is the prescribed attempt to eliminate these issues.

The next photo shows the stiffener cleco'd into position, after match drilling 17 #30 holes into the skin.  Directly behind the stiffener are the 2 brackets upon which the ADAHRS box will be mounted.  The nylon tubing which dangles from the former, behind the brackets are the pitot and static air lines that will be plumbed into the ADAHRS box.

Here is a picture of the magic black box, aka ADAHRS.

A close up of the unit, plumbed and mounted to the brackets.  The third port of the left, currently fitted with a nylon threaded plug, is for the angle of attack airstream.  Much more on that subject later, when I get to the installation.

 

A final parting shot of the installation showing the former, stiffener and the unit all mounted.  A 9 pin connector mounts to the rear of the ADAHRS box, but will not happen until the time the tailcone is mounted to the forward fuselage section.

Another of the manufacturing tasks to be conducted was a relocation of the GPS antenna tray.  The Viking engine sits considerably closer to the firewall than the Rotax, and that necessitated relocating the GPS antenna.

Below is my much smaller antenna tray that ended up getting mounted on the opposite side of the Engine Monitoring System (EMS) black box on the firewall.

This picture shows the EMS in the upper left hand corner...not shown is the GPS antenna tray.

 

Here is the installation picture of the GPS antenna on its tray on the engine side of the firewall.

 

Next photo is a shot of the Garmin GTR 200 comm radio with its tray, prior to installation.  The tray is the original from Vans, which shipped with a Dyno radio, which is no longer the standard.  Instructions were to verify that the bezel of the Garmin unit still cleared the cut out in the center instrument panel.  Thankfully, it appears to fit just fine....thank you very much.

 

As I mentioned at the outset, this is going to be a relative overview of the avionics installation because of the simplicity involved.  The picture below shows a lot of stuff!  On the far left is the "network interface unit" (NIU, my description) where each of the wiring harnesses terminate.  As previously mentioned, just behind and the right of the NIU, on the firewall is the EMS.  To its right is the gold colored transponder tray.  In front of the transponder tray on the instrument panel shelf is the backup battery.  The backup battery sits just to the left of the Garmin comm tray.  Above the comm tray sits the ADS-B unit.

Shown from the opposite side is another picture which better shows the Viking ECU, which is the red box mounted on top of the map box.  The long black hoses will attach to the two ports, which are currently capped off with a small interconnecting tube.

This shot shows a close up of the ADS-B unit atop the comm tray, looking from the firewall.