Postby Gadget » Sat Mar 17, 2007 8:14 am
OK OK OK. Me screwed up and down heavily. So like it was a nice morning to go fly and I must say the first one for quite a while. I fully charged the radio two days before but the morning i plugged it in there was a problem. I use on of the vertex standard radios wich in my opinion is quite a good radio. However, it seems the radio does not want to charge from the trikes electrical system.
So, I got to the hanger, did pre-flight and averything checked ok. Taxi-ed, radio check all fine. Got into the air and went over to FADX frequency and the crap hit the fan. This radio was fully charged two days before and now the battery went flat. The battery is not even a year old and has only ben used for 98 hours worth of flying. But, prepared as I am, I plug in the power from the elctrical system, which has been capacitorized, ionized, regulized and everything else you can think of to get it clean. No go. So I kept my mouth shut and flew around a while to see if the battery will charge, I did not want to go back to the airfield if no one could hear me, the airspace was quite busy and we have had a few issues in the past with aeries not doing proper radio when joining.
This didn't help either so I went back following close on rangers tail so as to shadow his radio calls. THis worked fine and I landed without incident.
As to buying a radio, this radio is fine, i think I just need one Paul's charging circuits to draw clean power of the trike for a situation like this as all my efforts at cleaning the power has come to nothing. My intercomm works perfectly, got it from Junkie just before he left us. But I will be replacing it shortly with one of Pauls units, just have to screw some un-suspecting frined out of a few bucks when I service his server again, right RANGER... he he he.
to conclude. Yes it may have been a tad wrong of me to continue flying when I figured there was a problem on the radio but i also believe that my decision to wait a while and shadow someone else up there and see if the radio charges, was valid.
generally my radio is one of the best when flying anywhere and i do not know why the battery went down in just two days, i did not forget it on as i do a double take on post flight on the radio, intercomm and instruments.
no excuses, just facts.
SUDDENLY, I hear this shrill that sounds like a special effect from either jarasic park or the Adam's family; "shhhhhhpeeeing ping ping blaavo goff ox shhhhh shreek routshhhhing shhh fromshhhhh deltashhhhh 200shreeeekpingshhhhhhhh to shhhhhhhhh dassss shhhhhenberg shhhhhh shreekhowsyourfather" over the air. I almost caked myself. Did the owl thing and almost twisted my neck off looking for the pre-historic flying, "something" rex.
