Hello everyone,
I'm in the absolutely rubbish position of not owning any sort of PAW system, nor even an aircraft. However, I plan to remedy that situation and have been spending far too much time looking at goodies for my potential craft and asking far too many questions of long-suffering but patient people, such as the excellent support at MGL (sorry Paul). My plan would be to install a permanent PAW system and I have read all the the documents on the main site regarding that AND antenna location, so I'm not just going for the easy 'answer my questions' without having done some homework
My potential steed will be fabric covered (Stitts Polyfibre) and I'd really like to know if mounting one of the tuned low profile antennas in the tail would be a decent set up. Clearly it wouldn't have too much metal around it apart from the tube fuselage and I understand it would not be a good idea to actually mount the antenna to one of those (vertical) tubes. I THINK it would be acceptable for the ADSB antenna because of the incoming signal strength but it would be good to know about the P3I reception from back there. I suppose I am in the enviable stage of being able to think about 'extras' before the order is even in and may be able to plan ahead for a couple of ground plates to be mounted in the tail before it gets covered but, if possible, I'd rather keep things nice and protected inside the fabric......and fewer bits sticking out. So, has anyone done this in a fabric covered aircraft yet and can report on their findings?
The second absolutely trivial thing I was thinking about was reducing the number of GPS antennas I would (potentially) have. At the moment my plan is to run two MGL iEFIS units and both will have separate GPS antennas. If I permanent-mount the PAW then could I use a GPS output from one of those EFIS units instead of having a third antenna on top of the glareshield? I'll be using EFIS GPS position for input to the transponder for ADSB but even if I only run one GPS 'out' from each unit then the PAW can be fed the data. As I said, trivia and only a means to have two matchboxes instead of three on the glare shield.
I'll leave my meanderings there for now as I have so many thoughts about power supplies and filters for MGL EFIS that I would bore everyone to death and that's before I've even got a toy to play with.
Thank you for your thoughts and any information on these vital questions