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« on: April 19, 2017, 05:29:35 pm »
Back home now.
With apologies for hijacking Ivor's thread, I thought it would be helpful to summarise my experience with PAW to date in one place so that those who understand these things better than me can make an informed diagnosis.
1. Prior to installation of PAW, I had no radio interference problems.
2. On installing PAW, I initially received hardly any traffic and started noticing radio interference problems. Eventually diagnosed both a faulty ADS-B dongle and aerial.
3. As we suspected closeness of the antennas to the transponder aerial may have been the cause of the interference, I have moved my PAW and 1090 MHz aerials away from their original locations and they are now at least 3 feet from the transponder antenna, as recommended in my Funke TRT800H manual.
4. The PAW itself remains physically quite close to my radio unit, but I suspect others will have similar installations and my options are limited!
5. On the first flight after moving the antennas, there was no interference. However, it has always been intermittent and present on some frequencies whilst clear on others.
6. On today's flight my base safety com 135.475 was clear, as was Manchester 118.575; Doncaster 126.225 was unreadable due to noise. Previously I have had unreadable levels of interference on Hawarden 123.350, Liverpool 119.850 and Welshpool 128.000.
7. When present, the noise is white noise of a very high level and cannot be squelched out. It disappears when unplugging the PAW.
8. I have run the PAW from two different Anker 20100 power cores as well as the recommended Anker 12v adapter and have experienced the same radio interference problems through all.
9. With my new ADS-B dongle and new 1090MHz antenna in their new positions, I am receiving loads of traffic - see pic attached of today's screen grab; 246 aircraft being received! My traffic volumes have increased perhaps ten-fold since I used the new 1090MHZ aerial.
10. Despite using the recommended USB-RS232 lead connected to my Funke TRT800H, I have never seen my aircraft appear on the traffic page of PAW.
11. Funke have not been very helpful throughout the process. Their instructions say to wire the 'brown' cable from the TRT800H wiring to the data out from the RS232 cable (orange); but there are two browns - see pic attached. They refused to confirm which one, saying they could not comment on my installation; by a process of elimination I connected as shown. As for the grounds, again I have had to assume, by a process of elimination, that the bare cable visible in the pic is the ground.
12. With the transponder wired as per the pic, I have been achieving ADS-B out successfully for a month. I know this because my FR24 tracks have been transformed and now appear in their entirety. For example, see pic attached of today's flight - I had to pull the PAW power just before the Ladybower Reservoir, once I'd switched from Manchester to Doncaster and the unreadable interference; my trace disappears immediately. Although I continued to Netherthorpe and back to Ashcroft on Mode S, without ADS-B, having lost the PAW GPS input, I was invisible to Flight Radar. So it looks like ADS-B has worked fine, but I've never appeared on the PAW traffic page.
13. I note that Ivor intermittently appears on his traffic page.
14. I love what this product is trying to achieve, and can see for some that it works brilliantly. For me, the ADS-B out functionality is a key point and I'm sad to have lost it. Outwards visibility from a gyrocopter is superb, but we are hard to spot from other aircraft and I want to be as visible as possible.
15. I suspect that (a) I have a faulty unit, (b) I have somehow wired my PAW-transponder incorrectly (but ADS-B out was working fine even today, despite the 'wrong data' message) or (c) there is some grounding issue affecting my radio (but all problems go when PAW is disconnected and there was no problem before PAW installation).
I have returned home with my disconnected PAW module, leaving the antennas in the aircraft.
Many thanks, once again.
Stu
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