Some time ago (15 years?) I bought a new handheld Garmin GPS-90 for $645 I believe and I installed it on the yoke of my Archer that I flew to work every day and ... well if you never flew IFR before GPS you just wouldn't understand. I connected it to the aircraft power with the internal batteries as a back-up. Every time I started up I fired up the little GPS-90 and it NEVER let me down. When I sold the Archer after completing the RV-6A I removed it from the plane and started carrying it in my flight bag. Last year we had a solid state voltage regulator fail after less than an hour into a flight from Panama City, Florida to Fayetteville, Arkansas with a planned fuel stop. The LASAR low voltage light and the alternator light came on. This means when you land you are not going to take off again until the problem is fixed and if you kill the Concord battery really bad, part of the fix is buying a new battery. My attempts to jump start the engine in this situation have been failures and hand proping is not an option with the standard LASAR ignition system. I reached back into the baggage compartment and dug out the GPS-90 put in 4 fresh AA batteries, entered KFYV, shut down virtually every electrical device and continued home non-stop. I'm sure you 496 MX guys are bored but I really like this trusty little companion and I cannot bring myself to throw it away because it has been rendered obsolete. Leaving it in the bag where it becomes another container for storing dead batteries agonizes me. What to do?
Well, I finally installed it in the RV-6A. I took the suction cup out of the antenna bracket on the remote antenna and mounted it on the glare shield with a dimple washer and one of the #8 screws attaching the instrument panel to the glare shield (I did not rivet my instrument panel to the glare shield per the drawing). I cut a hole in the screen in the glare shield vent hole above my avionics stack, installed a split grommet in the screen with black RTV to protect the coax and routed the coax down through my center console to the location above the spar between the seats. I routed the power cable the opposite direction to ground and the avionics 12V bus behind the instrument panel. To mount the receiver I took the original yoke mount apart and kept only the last hinged assembly that holds the receiver with a built in power connector. I found that the small hinged base fits nicely between the seats above the spar where the seat pans go horizontal for a couple of inches. I installed #8 floating platenuts on the underside of the wingspar bulkhead flange and drilled facilitating holes in the seat pans and thus mounted the receiver where it is in full view of both occupants and is in a natural position for manual inputs by the right hand of the pilot or left hand of the passenger.
If you have one of these old units laying around you may want to try this.
Bob Axsom
Well, I finally installed it in the RV-6A. I took the suction cup out of the antenna bracket on the remote antenna and mounted it on the glare shield with a dimple washer and one of the #8 screws attaching the instrument panel to the glare shield (I did not rivet my instrument panel to the glare shield per the drawing). I cut a hole in the screen in the glare shield vent hole above my avionics stack, installed a split grommet in the screen with black RTV to protect the coax and routed the coax down through my center console to the location above the spar between the seats. I routed the power cable the opposite direction to ground and the avionics 12V bus behind the instrument panel. To mount the receiver I took the original yoke mount apart and kept only the last hinged assembly that holds the receiver with a built in power connector. I found that the small hinged base fits nicely between the seats above the spar where the seat pans go horizontal for a couple of inches. I installed #8 floating platenuts on the underside of the wingspar bulkhead flange and drilled facilitating holes in the seat pans and thus mounted the receiver where it is in full view of both occupants and is in a natural position for manual inputs by the right hand of the pilot or left hand of the passenger.
If you have one of these old units laying around you may want to try this.
Bob Axsom
