Jeff and Vern...and sorry for the long post!
Jeff,
I, like you, did not know about Vern's ADS until after his post in this thread. The ADS has loads of features, and the ability to program it for slow-flight/approach speeds and cruise speeds is appealing. That being said, the size of your indicator is also appealing, as is the separate brain-box concept. Having four LEDs in a small package would seem to mount easily in the vertical, not take up much room, and thus you could mount it to the glareshield so as to be visible to the left of the runway, near where many VASIs/PAPIs are...sort of a "meatball, line-up, angle of attack" trio (showing my Navy "brainwashing", but saying that, I don't intend it as a crutch, just a tool...I also believe in having the ability to fly by the look of the runway and the feel of the plane!)
I know the ADS can be mounted either vertically or horizontally, but wonder if, at 2.25", it'd stick up too much. Horizontal may be the way to go there. I'm gonna play with a mock-up of each, and see how it looks (yours looks like it's about 1" to 1.25" tall or so, right).
It appears the ADS would provide a tool to fly more precise airspeeds while heads-up during a landing (cool), while a Dynon AOA repeater may just show when you're starting to get slow or approaching a stall (which could be enough for everyday use...I don't have the Dynon AOA yet, as that's part of my panel upgrade plan, so I've not had the chance to fly with the indication and see how it looks and feels in the pattern). In your experience with the Dynon AOA, does it work out that you fly at the green to yellow interface for normal landing speeds, and yellow is approaching stall, then the red to yellow interface is the stall? Not saying one should fly head down looking at the EFIS AOA display, just wondering how you've found it to work. And, in your DIY planning/fabricating, would that correspond to two greens for on-speed, yellow for slow, and red for stall or impending stall on your annuciator? Just trying to cypher this out a bit, as Jethro Bodine would say.
Actual answer to your question is, size and simplicity tend toward your product, while features, programmability and auto-dimming tend toward Vern's ADS.
Vern, while we're talking AOA here, I noticed that the ADS comes factory preset to light the LEDs at preset percentages of AOA. I'm figuring that means percentage of critical AOA, right? (If, say 15 degrees is critical, then the last red light comes on at 87 percent of 15 degrees?) Can you elaborate on how you set those percentages, from a practical flying standpoint? In the airspeed mode, I can easily correlate lights to speed, and put it where I want it to be. Yet perhaps that takes away the possible benefit of using AOA in the pattern, thus giving a visual input whether full flaps, half flaps or no flaps. In the comparison of the two products, I'm thinking about (probably over-thinking
) the interpretation of the many lights on ADS. Again, I don't want to hijack the thread, but others may be interested as well (good learning environment!). If this
is a hijack in progress, my apologies Jeff, and Vern, if you want to take it off-line, happy to do that too.
You guys are really creative, and I love the poor-man's HUD discussion!
Thanks for all the banter on this! Fun to talk it out!
Cheers,
Bob
