So I dropped off the rental car in Ventura and arranged for an Uber to take me to SZP to pick up the plane after the annual and the magneto issue were resolved. It was a beautiful day in early November and still before noon; I would be back st PSP with lots of daylight left to spare. Things were going great: the weather was perfect and the plane was likewise; what more could you ask for?
I spoke with Ray for a bit, gassed up the plane and off I went. I hadn’t been aloft for 5 minutes when I noticed the radio display turning opaque; this was not a serious event and happened about every 6 months; a simple adjustment of the brightness and contrast settings would return things to normal. I adjusted the settings, the radio display looked perfect and the rest of the flight was superb.
It had been about a month since I had taken the plane to Santa Paula and I was eager to put some hours on it. So the day after I returned from Santa Paula, sunrise found me at the hangar ready to take the plane out and otherwise just fool around. With the new battery, the engine sprung to life as soon as I cranked it over. But, oddly, once again the radio display turned opaque and once again I had to adjust the display settings. The seeds of doubt were planted.
The radio issue was not any small concern; although the adjustments to correct the opaque display were simple enough, the cause of the problem was not. The Garmin 430 radio is likely the most popular radio ever introduced for general aviation, but the technology is roughly 30 years old and Garmin is no longer supporting the product; you can’t blame them; you won’t find very many people supporting the IBM 386 line of computers either and those hail from about the same era. The crux of the problem is that Garmin has run out of replacement displays, and when the display is failing, it can become impossible to read the frequency settings at which point it is useless even though the radio itself is still working normally. My internal yellow caution light was shining bright.
So off I went, my mission now being to determine if the display issue was indicative of something serious or just a freak event. I flew it for about an hour, landed, refueled and flew for another hour. Everything look fine so the internal yellow caution light dimmed. But the following day I repeated the exercise and, again, the display was all wacked up when I first started the plane; and again I spent the next two hours flying the plane to see how the radio acted. Two hours of flying and the everything performed flawlessly; I may have been a bit rusty but I even managed to get in some basic aerobatic maneuvers; O.K., I may have been a lot rusty. But the objective was to give the radio a workout and it performed flawlessly.
And then I landed.
As I idled the engine while parked in front of the hangar, the radio display turned 99% opaque; it glowed a bright yellow hue. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put the display back together again; it was gone. But as I stated earlier, the radio communication functions still worked….as long as you knew the frequency setting. Fortunately, I soon discovered that I could see just enough of the display settings to make out the frequencies; but this information, i.e., the frequency settings, could only be discerned when standing outside the plane and looking at the display at an extreme angle; it could not be seen when looking at the display “head on” as when you are when seated in the pilot’s seat. So I managed to set the frequencies as follows: the active was set to PSP tower; the standby was set to SZP. And the following morning off I went, fat, dumb but not very happy on my way back to SZP.
And that’s when the next gremlin reared its head. It seems like whatever was ailing inside the black box was now causing it to reset, i.e., reboot about every three to four minutes; the radio would completely shut down and restart so that even the com portion of the radio was gone momentarily. Although I didn’t particularly care about not having the radio live while en-route, I was not 100% certain (in fact, I was not at all certain) that the radio was resetting to the correct frequency when it restarted; I was not ruling out the possibility that the radio would be totally screwed up and I would need to enter the traffic pattern and land at SZP without a radio; I was not overjoyed with that prospect.
Somewhere near Burbank I switched to what I hoped was SZP on the radio, and waited. Fortunately, the radio soon came alive with chatter from some unknown pilot of a plane departing SZP and I breathed a sigh of relief and the rest of the trip was a non event.
And then I discussed with Ray the options for replacing the radio and GPS and later he gave me an estimate of the total cost. Ugh. Oh well.
Just charge it.