Hi Bobby,

 

I bought my plane three years ago. It was built in approx. 1995. I had the VM1000 in it.

 

Since then I have been working on it and I am very close (hopefully) to being done. When I started to work on it I came across the VM1000 – it was not fully functional – it seemed that some wires around the engine were melted.

 

It seemed to be an easy fix. At this point a new engine monitoring system from Lancair was approx. 5000 $. Because of budget reasons I decided to repair the VM1000 and keep all my old steam gages. The only thing that I upgraded was the Garmin 530 to a 530 WAAS (good investment) and I added an angle of attack indicator. So far I got approx. 900 $ in spare parts and a lot of head ache in the VM1000. Visionmicrosystems was difficult to reach by phone and some spare parts had a lead time of 4 weeks. If there wouldn’t be people like Jon from AI Systems I still would not have the system running.

 

In regards to reliability and functionality of the VM1000 I can not tell much because I haven’t used it long enough during flight.

 

My conclusion: I probably should have put a newer engine monitoring system in my panel but at that time I just did not have the money to do it

 

Ralf