Brief Description: Update Garmin G430W and the VoiceFlight System
Update Garmin G430W and the VoiceFlight System. The Garmin upgrade was fairly straight forward. The VoiceFlight update was another story. When I inserted the thumb drive into the USB update port located in the avionics access door of the forward baggage compartment, the USB drive flashed a couple of times then stopped. It was supposed to continue flashing as it uploaded the updates. A call to the very friendly and helpful VoiceFlight Staff resulted in a suspicion that the two data wires in the cable connector were reversed. I called my cable maker at Approach FastStack and talked to the helpful cable wizard and owner, Tim Haas. He was able to quickly confirm that the wires were indeed crossed. As confirmed later by VoiceFlight, the original wiring drawings had the wires in the curent pin positions. The drawing was subsequently updated to corrent the pin positions. The problem for me now was that changing the pin positions at the connector was going to be difficult due to lacation and the need to contort to get access under the panel. I asked Tim about doing a crossover of the data wires within my USB extension that panel mounts to my baggage compartment door. He said that that was a reasonable solution and helped my identify the data wires of the extension once I removed the outer insulation. There were a red and a black wire for power and a white wire and a green wire for the data. I attached dsub pins to the wires then cross connected them. The pins were covered by strick tube and the cable was wrapped in electrical tape. After the fix, the VoiceFlight updated its database. I updated the operationing system to the newest version without any problems.
