John Hafen writes: What’s the
latest with Chelton (databases)?
John, I talked to Greg Schmidt, the newly
appointed Sales Manager for Chelton Non-Certified products: gschmidt@cheltonflightsystems.com,
208-389-9959/208-850-0181
cell. He’s been very helpful in getting my system up and running. He advised
that Chelton has arranged with Jeppesen to provide database updates for their
systems, effective in January of this year. I contacted Jeppesen at www.jeppesen.com/jsum/download
as he recommended, for the obstacle and chart data for my Chelton EFIS Sport.
You can make a one-time update for $??, but I opted for the $490/year subscription
for chart & obstruction data with 28-day updates. It’s my
understanding that Jeppesen notifies you when a new database is available for
download, but I’ve only received (and successfully installed) the first
update so far.
BTW, it’s taken me about two months to start to
understand the workings and capabilities of my Chelton system and the TruTrak Digiflight II VSGV autopilot
connected to it, and I some day hope to appreciate it’s full
capabilities. I now have complete flight path and vertical guicance for climb,
cruise and descent profiles now, but it’s taken a while to get there!
Have not yet done this in the weather, but expect to do so as I gain confidence
in the system and work out some of the “undocumented special features.”
For example, I originally set the minimum airspeed in the autopilot to 120 KIAS,
thinking that was as slow as I wanted to be puttering around with the A/P
flying the airplane. When practicing a coupled, full profile GPS approach (in
the clear) to 2W6 last week, the airplane flew the complete profile like a
dream, lined up on centerline, heading into a substantial cross wind with the
drift perfectly killed. At about 400’ in the air, the airplane nosed over
and headed for the ground. Instant paddle off the a/p and pulled back up to the
glide path, but I’m wondering WHAT WENT WRONG… The (now) obvious
answer—the TruTrak was programmed to maintain a minimum of 120 KIAS, and
when I pulled the power back to slow for landing, it computes “too slow”
and pushed the nose over. Easily corrected configuration setting in the TruTrak,
but would not have liked to see that for the first time in the soup! It turns
out that there is a similar “min airspeed” setting in the Chelton
as well, but I’d set that one to 100 KIAS…as I said, I still have
some cranium work to do here…
I have about 120 hours on my new IV-P, N437RP, with a
Chelton Sport, TruTrak VSGV, Garmin SL-30 and SL-40 radios, and EI MVP-50 monitoring
system. I am tickled pink with all of it, and wouldn’t change a thing. After
several months of fiddling, they are all now talking to each other, although I
still have some system settings to “tweak” –like the above.
If any of you have similar panel configurations, I’d love to exchange
thoughts on the MULTITUDE of software configuration options! For example, I
have good fuel quantity readings on the MVP-50, but have not figured out how to
map the fuel quantity data correctly to the Chelton… I know this is
probably trivial, but it’s still “on my list…”
Hope this helps, and the big lesson for me: Check these
things out CAREFULLY. This stuff is substantially more capable than anything I
flew in the Air Force, but that also means that it has some really clever ways
to really screw you!
Hope this helps!
Bob P