Hi All,
I installed my skybeacon today and thought I'd update everyone on how it actually worked and what it really took.
Installation in theory is pretty straightforward. Remove existing light, cut wire, crimp on new wire, and screw the unit into the existing holes. However I did run into a couple minor issues. I don't know about all 170's, but on mine the existing position light was held on with sheet metal screws into sheet metal nutplates, but the skybeacon uses 6/32 machine screws. Since it's all plastic and really expensive, I didn't want to screw around with alternate hardware. So I removed the wingtip, drilled out the nutplates, and riveted on some new 6/32 nutplates. Fortunately my Dad built an RV and has all the riveting equipment, not mention a hardware drawer that happened to have some spare nutplates.
This, however, brought to light the second issue. I realized that if I crimped the wires together it would make future wingtip removal a real pain. I remove my wing tips every other year for ACF50 treatment, so I needed something that could accommodate that. Fortunately Dad also had a spare molex 3 pin connector kit. I substituted the crimp splices uavionix provides with that and it worked great. This also gave me the added benefit of having something to capture the third (strobe) wire, as my airplane does not have strobes. If I choose to add them in the future, it will be as easy as pinning the wire from the wing and sticking it in the connector. For the ground the instructions say it will ground through the screws, but since I had that nice 3 pin connector and a ground wire on the unit, I went ahead ran a ground wire to a hole in the wing rib with some spare tefzel wire I had laying around from another avionics project.
Once mechanically installed I programmed it. I used my iphone, and the app is in the apple store for free. The skybeacon generates it's own wifi, so you just connect and then open the app. It's pretty intuitive, and there are about 7 or 8 things to configure. The instructions walk you through this, and it only took a few minutes. I'm not really an app or a computer guy, so I was relieved that it was pretty straightforward.
Last was the paperwork. Uavionix has a sample 337 on their website that I downloaded and filled out for my plane. The most time consuming part was finding the hexadecimal code, which you can get if you look up your N number on the FAA registry. I'm an A&P so I did all the paperwork and logged it myself. A local IA looked it over and signed it.
All told I probably had about 2 man hours into this. It would have been less than an hour had I not had to change the nutplates or chosen to do the wiring a bit differently. If it sounds like I'm complaining above, I'm not. This was a really quick and easy installation, and those minor issues are par for the course. I actually did this over 2 weekends, as the first weekend I discovered the screw issue, so I took the wingtip off and down to my Dad's shop for riveting. I did all the on plane work in an unheated hanger in WI, and I'm thin blooded, so if it really was anything more than quick and easy I'd be whining to you all right now.
I did my test flight this afternoon, got my report tonight (that took 5 minutes), and applied for the rebate. Time will tell how the skypbeacon holds up, but as far as installation goes I'm very satisfied.
DEM