Traffic Down

I have had intermittent traffic failures now for the past six months.  Originally after about 10 minutes of flight, it would periodically fail and flash on the MFD.  Sometimes I could pull the circuit breaker, let it sit a few minutes, then restart it and all would be fine.  After searching COPA forums, I discovered that this is very common with the L3 Skywatch traffic systems.  Typically, most avionics shops will tell you up front that they won’t even do anything with it other than pull it, send it to L3 and make the owner payout $3-4K.  Before doing this, there are several things to check that could save a ton of money.

The first fix is to look for loose fittings and clean all connectors.  Even though my Cirrus is only eight years old, like any airplane vibrations loosen things over time.  I checked the box below the copilot seat and all is tight.  No change, still intermittent.
The second fix is to take it to an avionics shop that is competent and have them recalibrate it.  I flew the plane up to Gardner Avionics by Atlanta and they recalibrated the system.  This seemed to have fixed it and all was well again. 

Fast forward five months and the Skywatch has died again.  This time the breaker trick doesn’t seem to work and after about two minutes of flight, it fails and never comes back on.  After reviewing more COPA posts, I find another owner who has had some luck fixing issues like mine.  He was a mechanical engineer for Boeing, so he’s pretty competent to say the least.  The issue he found was in the antenna.  First off, he said to take the bolts off the antenna from the inside, but don’t remove the antenna.  Take a wire brush and clean up the bolts and washers, then Deoxite them.  These washers are supposed to help ground the antenna and over time they get corroded and don’t ground well anymore.  Grounding on an all composite plane obviously poses some issues and you can see in the picture the "metal tape" on the outside of the composite that is used to solve this issue. 

The next step is to buy some more washers and cover up the ½” of exposed thread, so that the proper current is maintained.  For some reason, Cirrus missed this and put too long of bolts in the antenna mount.  Ensure that the connections clean and tight and reassemble.

Left rear bolt has more washer, but I still need more. Right shows factory exposed thread.

To get at the antenna, all you have to do is pull the black door seal off, which slips outward and the headliner padding comes apart.  SUPER easy.  This is a really good design by Cirrus!  The first thing I found is that one of the three cables that goes into the antenna was loose.  I also found that a ground wire that was attached to the right rear mount was also loose.  I cleaned it all up and put it back together, but no joy.  I talked with a Service Center in Tampa and they told me that once you find loose cables, you need to recalibrate it again to get it to work.  I had my local shop do this, but once again no joy.  The system came up with numerous fail codes and L3 said it needs to come back to them.  They charge a flat fee of $2925 to fix it!  OUCH!!!!  I wonder if this is the reason Cirrus went away from L3 and went to Garmin for all future traffic systems???    To be continued…