I had hopes to fly somewhere for lunch this weekend, but when I checked the logbook Friday night I discovered that the ELT had just become due for its annual recertification. I had purchased an ACK 406 MHz ELT, to replace the original one, but had never gotten around to installing.

It is still legal to keep using the old ELTs, for the time being. But, there is no longer satellite reception of emergency signals from the old ELTs. The only satellite coverage is for the newer, 406 MHz ELTs. The new ones also have the advantage of sending GPS position in the emergency message, so the Search and Rescue people have a very accurate position to head to.

I spent much of Saturday at the hangar, and got the new ELT mostly installed. The only really tricky part was the connector for the data cable from the GPS. The tiny little DIN connector supplied by ACK required the wires from the shielded cable to be soldered to four tiny little pins, and the body of the connector was plastic. I knew from bitter experience that my soldering skills were not up to task. Fortunately another Smiths Falls RVer, Ken T., was also installing his ACK E-04 ELT on the same weekend, and he is a master solderer. Ken had already soldered his connector to the data cable - he offered to give me that connector on a short length of cable, and I gave him my fresh connector. I had run the data cable under the floor when I installed the autopilot last year, so I spliced the two pieces of cable together.

I stopped work on Saturday when I couldn’t find the RS-232 line from the GPS to hook up to the front end of the data cable. I knew that my wiring diagrams would contain some important clues, but unfortunately they were at home.

Sunday, armed with my wiring diagrams, I quickly found the GPS RS-232 line and spliced it to the ELT data cable. I wired the power and ground for the GPS data decoder in the ELT, then did the functional test with an LED to confirm the ELT was receiving GPS data. It passed with flying colours - whew!