> Mike Mahar who did the due diligence of how and where to put the spherics elements.
the antenna on Mahar's old plane is in the tail on its own carbon shelf
and works much better once its was installed upside down so the strikes
were on the correct side of the aircraft, also it uses the bootstrap
from the HSI to swing the map quickly with heading changes... (if Jack
still has the king HSI) this is a major plus and has
lead to some negative experiences on incorrectly installed wx500 in CFS
hardware without slaved heading too.

> on the ground with 0 BER or Bit Error Rate.
> in the air my BER goes to about 8 if it isn't 200.
hmm, sounds like there is some nose that's being injected into the
system.. see the "avionics black art" posts. also note
there was a bug in BER reporting on 6.0A3 or lower software
This bug didn't effect WSI reception or drawing, but BER reported
in the faults page had a byte ordering issue. (cosmetic)

>  I still don't have Lightning showing on the list.
Lightning is a free option, but you MUST call to have it added to your account,
it can't be added online.

I use the stock WSI antenna mounted outside the aircraft with a low loss 2'
coax connection to the box. (yea, I'm the guy that mounted the xbow500
in the center of the baggage compartment to "fix" early magnatometer issues)
wsi fails if I do several rolls in a row, but never more than 5mins (full cycle is
15mins) I did see it black out for 15mins for the first time last friday at 3pm EST,
but after landing I hit the wsi website and noticed they had a system wide failure
so no one was getting anything.  I've been extremely pleased with onboard wx, it
has changed the way I fly.

Sierra Hotel 18ship: http://rob.com/pix/pkb/P1010363

Rob