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Position and strobe wiring

M

MarkCFI

Active Member
I’m the new owner of an RV-4

My first project is replacing the wing position lights with strobe with the uAvionix skybeacon and skysensor

I removed the starboard light just to take a look at the wiring.

The position light has a red and white wire attached and the strobe has a red, white, and black wire attached.

I understand that I will need to bypass the high voltage supply to the strobe to feed the strobe on the uAvionix light but I wasn’t expecting to see three wires attached.

I’m assuming the red or white is a ground and the other is the 14v supply but wasn’t sure what the black might be?
 
Find out what legacy strobe system is on the aircraft. If the power pack for the strobe is not inside the wing tip area then there is probably one main power pack located somewhere else in the airframe that runs all sets of strobes. If you elect to keep the legacy strobe in the opposite wingtip not getting the uAvionix device then you need to keep that centralized strobe power pack in place to continue to fire the un-modified wing tip. Then you will disconnect the strobe cable from the power pack going to the wing tip to be retrofitted with the SkyBeacon. You can then re-purpose this cable to send the strobe power to the SkyBeacon wing tip by using one of the wires in the disconnected strobe cable. That chosen wire would get connected to the strobe switch power wire which supplies power to the original power pack from the panel switch. Basically you would be bypassing the power pack to send bus power to the SkyBeacon strobe power when the switch is turned on.
 
Thanks Jim

I actually have a Skybeacon and a Skysensor so will be replacing both wing tip position lights. As you suggested I’ll repurpose the existing wire and bypass the high voltage supply for the wings.

There also appears to be a strobe in the tail so I’d like to replace that with a position light / strobe combo LED as well. I don’t have a line on that yet so I’m assuming something like that is reasonably easy to find.

I appreciate the help
 
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