Quote:
Originally Posted by Jerry Stuckle
Mark,
I am also a pilot. There is very little you can do legally with your
radio. The FAA regulates anything to do with the avionics pretty
closely. Even with a General Radiotelephone license (grandfathered from
a First Class Radiotelephone), I can't work on avionics legally
(although many years ago you had to have at least a Second Class to work
on most transmitters). And if you don't have the technical background,
you're likely to do more harm than good.
. . .
Since you mentioned no problems with receiving, chances are it is not
the antenna, and you can ignore Jim's advice (which would be illegal if
you followed it, anyway). I know it hurts - but your best bet is to
cough up the Benjamin and have an avionics shop check it out. They know
what they're doing and can fix it for you.
And I would consider $100 cheap - it costs me more than that to rent a
Cessna 172 for an hour...
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Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry, AI0K
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Jerry, thanks for the suggested course of action. The plane is amateur-built, (an experimental), so I've gotten used to doing everything except the annuals myself, but you are right, this situation more closely parallels the required 24 month transponder check/certification--it affects others (everybody else using the RF spectrum) and needs to be handled by a certified shop.
But the prices for service! Dang. I'll probably be very lucky to get a diagnosis for $100. A new radio would be about $1k, a used version of this one would cost about $400, and if I just use the handheld Yaesu with an external antenna, the cost is zero. I'm having a hard time figuring out why this TSO'd, entirely solid-state aircraft radio would crump out in the first place (e.g. why they needed to replace capacitors) and why that fix didn't work longer than 12 months.
Mark