Sandel 4500 installation manual

Looking into tailcone, showing the new KGA gyro installation at lower left. The job fell to Tom Knoll, the most experienced installerat Avionics West , who has been doing this kind of workfor more than 20 years. Tom had done previous avionics installations in my airplane, and Ihad a great deal of confidence in his ability to handle this admittedly complexinstallation.

But because I was curious and because I knew I was going to be writing thisarticle , I asked Tom to let me look over his shoulder, ask questions and take photos asthe installation progressed. He then created a big Excel spreadsheet that hadcolumns corresponding to each item of avionics, and rows for every signal that needed tobe hooked up.

The SN took up three columns because it has three pin D-connectors onthe back pins in all to accommodate the extraordinary number of inputs and outputs. The cells of the spreadsheet contained the relevant connector pin numbers for that signal. Constructing this spreadsheet took hours and hours of painstaking work, and by the time itwas done, it had a dozen columns avionics connectors and well over rows signals with pin numbers at each appropriate intersection.

This spreadsheetwould become the wire list that defined the wiring harness and hookups, and wouldultimately be placed in the aircraft maintenance records for the benefit of any futureavionics technician that winds up having to work on the airplane. Next step was to open up the airplane. The seats came out, the glare shield came off,and so did a few side panels to provide access to the wiring.

All panel-mounted radioswere removed, the instrument panel was partially disassembled, and all radio racks wereremoved from their mounting rails. The encoder mounted nicely where the old slaving amphad been with easy access to the aircraft static system. The KGA presented more of achallenge because it is rather large, sits high on its shock mounts, and has to be mountedlevel to function properly.

Tom wound up having to fabricate a moderately complex mountingbracket and rivet it into the tailcone to accommodate the new gyro. Uh…does anyone remember what these wires are for? The completed wiring harness, ready to install. The plate with the three SN connectors are at lower left.

Each wire is individually marked with a circuit ID to facilitate maintenance. Tom Knoll working on final hookup. Asanticipated, there was not enough length in the wiring harness to the ADF to permit it tobe moved over to the location of the old Loran, so a bunch of wires had to be spliced andextended. He also had to mount a couple of new circuit breakers on the circuit breaker panel.

Installing the new GX50 was straightforward enough, but mounting the GPS antenna turnedout to be a bit tricky. Tom wanted to find a way to mount the GPS antenna on the cabin roofwithout having to drop the headliner, which is a messy and time-consuming job.

There wasroom to mount the antenna immediately above the cabin loudspeaker, but the question waswhether it was possible to snake the antenna feedline to that location with the headlinerin place.

After a lot of patient probing with a piece of stiff coat hangar wire, Tommanaged to do exactly that. The next step was making up the wiring harness.

After making a bunch of lengthmeasurements and notes in the airplane, Tom moved back into the maintenance office andstarted work on the harness. This is painstaking, time-consuming work. Each wire is cut tosize, repetitively marked along its length with the appropriate circuit ID, and crimped orsoldered to the appropriate interface connectors. Many of the wires are shielded,requiring extra effort.

The harness is made up in special wire looms, then meticulouslylaced up, tie-wrapped, and heat-shrinked into a complex-yet-tidy umbilical cord. A few extra hours at this stage couldprevent some expensive fried avionics later. Now it was back to the aircraft to install the harness and complete the final hookupand partial reassembly of the disassembled instrument. I watchedanxiously as Tom applied power to the airplane and turned on the avionics master.

Everything lit up the first time! The SN provides a series of 20 maintenance pages for configuring and aligning the interfaces with other avionics. With power to the avionics, the time had come to program the SN inputs and outputsfor the particular interfaces required in this installation.

This causes the instrument to display a series of 20 maintenance pageswhich can be navigated with the up- and down-arrow keys. Inmost cases, this is just a matter of selecting which kind of box you have from a menu ofdifferent choices. In some cases, however, some fine-tuning is required such as to nullout any errors in the flux gate or OBS interfaces.

I found the fact that the SN letsyou do this with software, rather than by opening up boxes and tweaking trim-pots, to beincredibly cool.

In the course of going through this setup procedure, each individual interface istested for proper operation. Despite all the pains taken earlier, we did have a fewproblems at first. Battery cart hooked up, and preparing for pre-test-flight checks on the ramp. That was quite a job! That meant closing up the rest of theairplane, reinstalling the glare shield and seats and generally making sure it was readyto fly. By the time it was done, this turned out to be a fairly big installation job.

Tom Knollindicated that he had approximately hours of work into it all told. Of that, heestimated that about 40 hours was attributable to the installation of the GX50 GPS andblind encoder, including mounting the GPS antenna and rearranging the panel to put the GPSin an optimum location. That left roughly 60 hours for the SN installation itself. Sandel says to expect a typical SN installation to require 40 hours, but myinstallation took half again as much time.

There were at least three good reasons forthis. Second, my installation involved the removal of the existing air-driven HSI and theinstallation of a new remote electric gyro, with all the bracketry and wiring that thisentailed. In any case, this is the sort of installation that should not be rushed. Figureon at least 40 hours of labor, and remember that a few extra hours spent inmeticulous pre-installation planning will pay great dividends in terms of winding up withan installation that works just the way you want it to, with no surprises.

We had no difficulty convincing our local FSDO to sign off on the installation. Airplane maintenance is like going to the toilet: The job is never finished until thepaperwork is complete. However, initself, the TSO does not constitute an approval basis for installing the instrument inyour aircraft.

Installation in any other type of aircraft requires a Form one-timeapproval. Attaching a copy of this letter tothe Form for your SN installation should make its approval more-or-less arubber-stamp affair.

Then thefour calibration adjustments, one for each quadrant, are tweaked to reduce the errors toas close to zero as possible. In my case, I was able to achieve accuracy within one degreeon all headings. While I was at it, I re-swung the wetcompass, too, and adjusted it for minimum error.

Time to go fly! Tom and I spent 45 minutes putting the system through its paces. Forthe most part, everything seemed to work more or less as advertised. However, theautopilot badly overshot its turns in both heading and nav mode.

The Sandel installationmanual had prepared us for that. We brought up the autopilot interface maintenance page onthe SN and adjusted the heading and course gradient values until the overshoot waseliminated. The autopilot flew smoothly now, but we noticed that in nav mode, with fullCDI deflection, its intercepts were much shallower than normal.

We made note of theproblem and continued the flight. The biggest problem we had during the initial test flight was two unexplained compasscard deviations in the course of the minute flight. This concerned us greatly, becausethis was clearly an intermittent problem and one we had no confidence that we couldreproduce on the ground.

On the autopilot too-shallow-intercept problem, Sandel tech support saidthat they were confident that the problem could be resolved simply by reducing the coursegradient adjustment a bit further. With respect to the intermittent heading problem, theyadvised checking to make absolutely sure that the three pin connectors on the rear ofthe SN were fully engaged into the mating connectors at the rear of the clamp tray.

Sure enough, a flashlight-and-mirror inspection revealed that we did indeed have aconnector engagement problem. A simple adjustment to the connector panel on the rear ofthe clamp tray resolved the problem. My new panel. The EHSI is just gorgeous at night! Two days later, Tom and I went up for a second test flight. We adjusted the autopilotoutputs once again and were able to get proper intercepts. The compass headingsremained solid as a rock, confirming that the connector engagement problem had indeed beenthe cause.

The following week, I went up for a third flight, this time with my good friend Chris,an excellent instrument pilot who owns a Bonanza and a Cessna We flew for an hour anda half and put everything through its paces.

I found myself so totally engrossed playing with the SN and GX50 that I couldeasily have run into a mountain or another airplane had Chris not kept elbowing me in theribs when I screwed up. Reminds me of a good friend who took up his R for a solo testflight after installing a fancy new autopilot. He got so preoccupied with his new toy thathe wound up landing gear-up. Standard HSI-like user interface plus use of intuitive symbology makes mastering the SN user interface easy…much easier than a new GPS, for example.

Sandel created a user interface designed to be as conventional as possible, toensure that users familiar with a mechanical HSI would have no difficulty using it.

However, the SN has a great deal of functionality that a mechanical HSI does nothave, and it takes a little practice to learn how best to take advantage of thosecapabilities. Using the SN becomes second nature after a few hours. The red line through the heading top left alerts the pilot to a slaving discrepancy.

As you can see from the photos, Sandel has used every square inch of the unit's face for use as the "screen". The result is an image that is large and sharp.

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