As you work away on your projects you will undoubtedly experience varying levels of customer service (or lack thereof) from the many vendors you'll deal with along the way.  Fortunately, most suppliers to the homebuilt community are very nice, relatively easy to deal with, and usually helpful when help is needed.  There are some, though, that stand head and shoulders above the crowd and I thought I'd share the identity of several that I've had the good fortune to work with while helping Ted Noel with his (soon to fly!) Eagle540-powered IVP...

The guys at Aerotronics are amazing.  All the way from the top down...  I could fill a book with what they did for us along the way.  I won't consume your time with one, though... just keep them in mind when you start thinking "panel".

The folks I've dealt with at Grand Rapids Technologies are also beyond reproach.  Greg Toman helped with more than a few difficulties along the way, and I'd be hard pressed to find someone more willing to help out.

Except maybe for the guys at Electronics International.  Ted has four different EI instruments in his airplane, and I needed help with a few of them.  First time was about a year ago, when I was trying to share the fuel flow signals from the EI transsducers with both their instrument and the Chelton EAU.  Long story short on that one, with their help (and Greg's at GRT) we designed a little piece of circuitry that made it possible, so we now have redundant fuel flow data.  The latest one happend just this week, while trying to calibrate the fuel probes to drive their dual-tank fuel level instrument.  I couldn't get the right frequency module to provide any useful data, so the first thing they did was replace the (2-year old but brand new) instrument itself with their latest and greatest (which calibrates much easier than the older version).  When replacing the "head" didn't help with the frequency module problem, we were sent a pair of new modules (latest and greatest again, with improved RF rejection and other improvements) which ultimately solved the problem (the original rh module had a broken resistor... probably damaged in handling sometime along the way during the building process.)  The replacements were sent FedEx next day, no charge.  All they asked was that we return the old instrument and label it with their RMA number.  Pretty amazing.  If that's not going beyond the call of duty, I don't know what is.

Keep these folks in mind when you're making these sorts of decisions.  I guarantee you will be more than pleased with what you get from all of them. If you've got similar stories you'd like to share about your favorite vendors, please do so...

 <Marv>