Three Unexpected Things

I flew my airplane from Dallas to Phoenix for the holidays, and back.  Over the course of the trip, my IFD-540 did three things that I did not expect.  In chronological order:

About ten minutes from the end of my first leg the IFD lost GPS lock.  I've read about this issue here in the forums, but with more than a year and a half behind the IFD I have never observed the problem in my airplane until now.  There were five GPS receivers active in my airplane, including two Garmin portable units, an old iPad, and the NavWorx GPS (that the FAA currently has heartburn over) and the IFD was the only one of the five to lose the position lock.  The IFD found itself again after about a minute.  I didn't take a picture of it while the position was lost.  With so much redundancy available to me, the dropout was of minimal concern.  The only thing about it was that my new iPad (Christmas gift) does not have an internal GPS and it will rely on the IFD for position when I start using it.  The other problem was that I found I was not prepared to revert to non-GPS guidance.  I know, this is a pilot issue and not an equipment issue.  It was a VFR leg, and conditions were clear, but I did not yet have the field in sight and I did not immediately know what heading would take me there.  I had been relying on the map and track guidance in continuous light turbulence, so the heading indicator had not been steady on any one value for more than an hour.  I do not have an autopilot or a heading bug.  I know: a pilot issue.

The westbound legs of the trip were conducted at relatively low cruising altitudes in an attempt to minimize the headwinds.  West Texas and New Mexico are sparsely populated, and I'm sure I was in areas of poor coverage for both radar and ADS-B.  I rather frequently observed a "Traffic Sensor Fault" CAS message, which I attributed to the poor coverage condition.  But as I passed North of Tucson, I had the CAS message while at the same moment there were at least six targets being displayed.  See image below.  That one had me scratching my head.  What fault could there be when the thing is working?



The last odd thing the IFD did was on my return trip.  When I checked the TAF coming into Dallas, I noticed that the wind data ran into the right-side margin of the screen.  Notice the "21013KT" text.



One thing that was not unexpected was the little bit of data in the top left corner of the screen.  While I had to duck under the headwinds for the trip west, I rode high on the eastbound legs and yes I really was doing 158 knots over the ground in a Cessna 172 (and at times even faster than that).  We made it from Demming to Dallas in under four hours, a new personal best.

Also, the ETA at Destination is indicating AM when it should be PM.  This is a known issue that I'm sure is already slated to be addressed in a future software release.  It happens when the arrival time occurs in the following Zulu day.  Not unexpected.

David Bunin

DavidBunin wrote: Also, the ETA at Destination is indicating AM when it should be PM.  This is a known issue that I'm sure is already slated to be addressed in a future software release.  It happens when the arrival time occurs in the following Zulu day.  Not unexpected.

12 hour time seems to be the default time depiction.  I prefer 24 hour time depiction, but did not bother to investigate whether it could be changed until something similar happened to me, with arrival time 12 hours off.  With that, I found the option to change to 24 hour time buried in the AUX-User Options list.  That corrected the problem for me.

I've experienced that traffic issues and the false report of "Traffic Sensor Fault" is supposed to be corrected in 10.2.   Today, I experienced the opposite.  I had a datalink error message but NO traffic sensor fault but still I was not receiving any traffic on my display despite multiple aircraft showing on Foreflight via the Stratus.  I reset the circuit breaker for the MLB traffic and immediately all the traffic popped onto the screen.

I intentionally reset the MLB breaker. It did not trip but resetting it solved the issue.

What is EFM311500??

Edited by oskrypuch - 07 Jan 2017 at 6:45pm

I would suspect that that is what tripped it up, no new line break genereated by EFM, vice FM.

Edited by oskrypuch - 11 Jan 2017 at 12:31pm