Release 9 Insiders - Anyone can post - R9

The other day after landing from a flight where it went out twice, I checked the GPS sensor page while taxiing and the accuracy measures were all rapidly winding up. I stopped but they kept going up until they reached such high numbers the GPS went offline and into fault mode.

My maintenance shop wants to blame a faulty antenna, but given it comes back on line when I reboot the IFD I am a bit suspicious of that diagnosis.

Any suggestions on what this issue may be?

Unfortunately it looks like the antenna was not the issue after all. Ian Kirby from Complete Avionics at the Gold Coast in Australia is going to contact your tech guys Monday your time to see if they can come up with anything.

Below is the email I sent to ian this morning for his discussion with Avidyne and outlines the history of the problem.

Would appreciate if you could follow up with the tech support guys to make sure they respond as quickly as possible. I am kind of stuck with local VFR flights only at the moment while this problem persists. It i super frustrating.

Regards

Andrew

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Ian,

As discussed here is the history of VH WWJ's current GPS issue.

1. About 6 months ago I started getting intermittent GPS 1 failures in flight. The failure frequency was a failure every 3 or 4 flights.

2. The failures gradually became more frequent and I realised if I rebooted IFD1 in flight the situation would resolve.

3. Over the last few weeks, GPS1 failures became more frequent (sometimes several times in a flight) and GPS2 often also started going offline once GPS1 had failed, resulting in dual GPS failures and having to reboot both IFD's to get the GPS's back online.

4. Once while on the ground, I noted on the sensor page that the HPL and VPL figures for GPS1 were rapidly increasing before the GPS went to fault mode. Other times while I have been watching they have gone from solid reception straight to fault mode.

5. As you know we replaced the antenna for GPS1, but it appears we did not resolve the issue.

Note : the GPS1 antenna is on the roof and the GPS 2 antenna is under the glare guard

Appreciate if you could discuss the above with Avidyne and let me know if you come up with anything.

The Complete Avionics guys are in touch with Avidyne tech support and sent all the logs in today so hopefully we will have some progress soon.

I have an interesting fact that may be relevant that I wanted to pass on. All three R9 equipped aircraft in the local area have had dual GPS failures over the past week. Two would be a coincidence, all three seems to me like something a bit more systemic. I only just passed that information on to Complete after they closed for the day. Would you mind feeding that in to your tech support team for their info as well.

Appreciate any feedback you may have.

Except that the Garmin equipped aircraft don’t seem to be having the same issues!

I haven’t heard anything back and it has been a couple of days since I sent the logs. Any chance you could ask what is happening or if there is a progress update? Appreciate it.

Thanks

Andrew

I checked earlier this morning and no communication so far.

Moving GPS#2 to an external antenna is unlikely to remedy the problem. GPS#1 already has an external antenna and is the one that was failing initially, triggering this whole issue. Both the external antenna GPS and the internal antenna GPS simulatneously went from good reception to Failure mode with no preceding warnings or loss of integrity. One minute they were just fine and then "bang", both in Failure mode.

That sequence, plus the other R9's in the same area are also having dual GPS failures (Rod Peachy in VH PGA) had another series of failures over the weekend) point to something other than GPS2 antenna location don't they?

Regards

Andrew