Time to upgrade the panel.... again

It's been a few years since I upgraded the panel, and that was just a simple swap of my Advanced Flight Systems 3500 for a 4500 which was a great upgrade. I didn't have to cut any holes or remove any wiring so it was relatively painless.  My AFS-4500 has worked flawlessly over the last few years and I have no complaints on its operation. I got used to the sequence of buttons and the procedures for approaches and loved the synthetic vision display. All in all, just a great piece of avionics.

But as the years went by, AFS started to improve the software and increase the display sizes, adding more dedicated buttons and upgrading the processor. Each year at AirVenture, I would visit the booth and marvel at the larger screen and increased functionality, wondering whether it was worth the cost of moving up. This time, there would be a lot of changes required to upgrade and I knew it would be time consuming and expensive but I was getting ready to do it. I always worry when I make such a decision like this: I have a fully functional panel and now I'm going to rip things out and put something new in that could give me problems.

My original panel:

I started to imagine what the panel might look like and to make sure things would fit. I wanted to get rid of all the back up analog stuff, the airspeed indicator, the altimeter  and the attitude indicator to make room for as big a panel as I could fit in the area left. Now I had a few options with AFS. I could have gone with the 5400 and left all the back up instruments but the 5400 would not have the extra dedicated buttons and the screen size would remain the same as my 4500, 8.4". Or, I could get the 5500 which had the extra buttons. But it required a larger cutout in the panel and it still had the 8.4" screen. I would lose the back up instruments and have to find some other means to have primary instrument back up. Since I was committed to as large a screen as I could fit and a new digital back up, I decided on the AFS-5600; 10.4 High Resolution display, 21 buttons, 3 knobs, 1 joystick.  There also was an option for touch screen display and I decided to go with it, though not really sure if I was all that convinced I would use it.  I just had to make sure it would fit in my panel. More on that later.

The next issue was what to use for my back up instruments. Since panel space was limited I knew that I would only be able to use the 3.25" hole that was left so I looked for what was available. There really isn't too much out there and at first I was drawn to Trutrak's Gemini ADI.  It was inexpensive, fit right in the hole in the panel and looked pretty nice. But the one thing I realized was that the Gemini did not really give you a full blown EFIS. It uses GPS and motion sensors to simulate attitude and rates and does a pretty go job of doing it, but it does not have a AHRS.  I wanted the second AHRS and for that I needed a true small EFIS. There are only two that would fit in my panel; the Avmap Ultra and the Dynon E6.  I decided on the Dynon unit as it had everything I needed and with Dynon now owning AFS, I knew I would have product support on everything.

For fun, I did a little photoshopping of my panel. First I just stretched my 5400 to see how it would look:

Then I actually used an image of a 5600 and TT Gemini and moved my AP:

Then I put in the Dynon E6:

So I called AFS and expressed my interest in the upgrade and what it would cost. They would credit me on the 4500 and discount other parts so I went ahead and ordered from AFS in early February. It came to about $5800. I finally decided to not only do the panel upgrade but also upgrade my autopilot controller to the new Trutrak Vizion autopilot with the Emergency Autopilot Level mode. Pretty neat.

Of course being an experimental aircraft I could do this on my own but there is no way I'm doing that! Rick and Tres and Islip Avionics know my plane well and had done the previous upgrade so I found some time with them to do the job. They anticipated about two weeks so we went set a date in mid March for the work. I was committed.

I was expecting a pretty straight forward "swap" of the two AFS units but it turns out the wiring was not exactly "plug and play". First we needed to swap-out the Crossbow magnometer with a new AHRS (since they are not built into the 5 series) and this was mounted in the tail section.

We also needed to install a back up battery as there is no back up built in to the unit. The back-up battery is reasonable size and requires an additional 5amp CB to be added to the panel.  I managed to fit it just fine behind my panel.

The wiring harness itself required a bit of an upgrade so much of the wiring was replaced in the end. But after all was said and done. I ended up with a panel that looks and works great!

There are still a couple of issues. For some reason, my OAT is way off (may be a grounding issue) and my radio reception is a little weaker on one radio but that was somewhat a problem in the past. I think I'll upgrade my antennas with some newer ones and see if that helps.

In the end, I'm happy with it and I'm slowly getting comfortable with the new panel. I found myself using the touch screen more than I thought so I'm glad I went with it. Always amazed at the technology in the plane!!