ELT Battery Expiration Date

[snopercod]

Originally Posted by az_gila

Could you have a bad co-ax causing the ELT to use more power than expected during the 3 month testing?

I suppose it's possible, but during my troubleshooting, I replaced it with another piece of coax and got the same failure. During that test I also bypassed the static suppressor and 90 degree BNC fitting. It still failed. The coax in question is a 24" length of RG-142. The factory admitted that a low battery could cause the VSWR failure mode. Don't ask me how the battery could have gotten low after two years with no activations other than the self-tests and annual G-switch test. I'm thinking that the "5 year life" may be on paper only.

[Canadian_JOY]

Although I can't speak for this instance specifically, most manufacturers design their ELT's so the battery packs meet the minimum requirements plus a fair bit of safety factor. Having seen the battery life testing results for one 406MHz ELT manufacturer, I was highly impressed because the unit exceeded battery life requirements by a factor of 2X.

I doubt ACK would design a battery without a fair bit of safety factor built into the design. If you burn through another battery pack quickly, that says there's an electrical "leak" somewhere that's sucking the battery dry prematurely.

With that having been said, this is one of the few benefits of the Canadian system that requires our ELT's to visit the avionics shop every 12 months - during those recertification visits performance factors such as battery current draw are measured. Obviously these aren't things that can be done with the owner/operator's annual G-switch test since special equipment is required.

[Abraham]

This site really needs to work on how images are processed...