I did a series of night flights yesterday so I got to play around a lot with the brightness settings on my IFD540. Here are some observations:

1. The photocell setting for brightness works fine during the day but at night, it makes the screen too dark. The Dimming bus setting seems better but I didn't fly with it for too much time.

2. I set up a different profile for night flying with the brightness settings (for both the screen and the bezel) set to Manual. Other than the issue that is raised in the point #3, once I adjust them to a setting that works for me (in this case it was 52% for both), that setting is not retained after the unit is powered off. Whenever I pick my "night" profile, I find that the Manual brightness settings are at 100% and I have to adjust it every time. My flight last night had 4 legs so it was rather irritating that i had to do it every time!

3. When adjusting the manual brightness setting, there appears to be a "cliff" in brightness between 52% and 48%. As my eyes adapted to the darkness, I was reducing it one click at a time and at one point when I thought that 52% was a bit too bright, the next click was 48% and it was too dark. I took a photo in case Tech Support wants to see it but it is a bit deceiving since the phone adjusted quite a bit for the lower brightness. I tried it on the IFD Trainer but the brightness setting there doesn't seem to do anything.

I had not played with the brightness settings much in 10.2 (I have had the plane around 5 months and upgraded to 10.3 when it came out a couple of months ago) so I don't know if this brightness behavior is different in 10.3 vs. any older releases.

Any thoughts (and input from Avidyne) on whether this is expected behavior or a bug would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Vas

RV-10 N649BG

2xAFS5600+IFD540+TruTrak Vizion 385

vas4avidyne wrote: Any thoughts (and input from Avidyne) on whether this is expected behavior or a bug would be appreciated!

That behavior has not changed with 10.3.  We do have some pending changes that will be in a future release.

- the "cliff" in manual brightness mode will be gone 

- the last brightness setting will be retained across power cycles, but the IFD will not power up at less than 20% brightness.

This has been discussed before in http://forums.avidyne.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=2395&PID=27983&title=10-3-upgrade-issues#27983" rel="nofollow - another thread .

Vas