KRnetHeads, I flew two hours yesterday afternoon, and was going to sit it out and do some things on the plane today. But an hour before sunset I was done with what I was going to do, and decided to fly anyway. One of the tests I was going to do tomorrow was fly it without a generator. My iEFIS engine instrument has had the jitters ever since I installed it, and I wondered if the single phase generator was putting out spurious emissions that caused it. So I took off with the battery reading 12.5v and flew for an hour. The readings were much smoother, so I proved I need a better regulator, a three-phase generator, and/or a filtered power supply for the iEFIS. Having said this, my radio is crystal clear with no RPM-related noise at all and with no filtration, so it may be an iEFIS susceptibility issue.
But the most surprising thing about the flight was that with no generator charging it, the battery only dropped .2V in an hour of flight! This is a 6 year-old Odyssey 680 AGM battery that started N56ML for years. The Compufire is supposed to fire down to 7V...and then I have the backup battery at the flip of a switch. I have a new 680 that I bought during the starting troubles that appeared the day of the planned Chino flight. Might as well swap them and put the old one in place of the backup. Maybe I don't even need a generator anymore! just kiddin' there. I guess it's time to relearn how to use this ancient-but-expensive oscilloscope I inherited from Jim Hill several years ago... -- Mark Langford ML at N56ML.com http://www.n56ml.com
