Brief Description: Avionics power up and initial programming
The first order of business was to install the #1 GTR 20 and the GTX 23 onto the avionics rack. Due to the orientation of the GTX 23 connector, and the length of the RG 400 that I left myself to work with for the COM 1 radio, I had no choice but to rotate the radio by 90 degrees to make everything fit. Garmin makes the radio brackets interchangeable so that was a fairly simple matter of moving the brackets to the sides and using two of the existing nutplates for one side and drilling two new holes for the other side. I elected to just use screws and nuts to attach that side…much easier than installing nutplates in the confined space.
After working on the radio installation, I loaded the PFD, MFD , autopilot and GTN 625 into the panel and started powering things up. It was very gratifying to have everything start communicating and while I have a lot of systems programming to do, it all works so far! One obvious issue to deal with right off the bat—my G3X system does not recognize that I have two radios, so I’m going to have to do a little research in order to better understand what the fix will be. Aside from that, everything seemed to work pretty well. Big day as this means that 95% of the cabin wiring is finished!
