Conquering aviation, one landing at a time.
Mike Regen of Gaithersburg, MD flew his RV-7A for the first time back in November of 2007, and he recently put together this cool video condensing the construction process down to less than 3 minutes. Congratulations on yor first flight Mike!
Sigh… one of these days I’ll post my own RV-7 construction video.
A few posts ago I told you that I had purchased a Zaon MRX for use during training . I’ve used it twice now and I thought I would give you my first impressions of it.
After just two flights, I am really glad I bought it. Why? Because it does exactly what Zaon intended it to do; detect and alert you to traffic in your vicinity. What’s amazing is just how often it does detect traffic, and I am not talking about in the airport area. We’ll be cruising along at 3,500′ and hear it beep, look up and see the word “Advisory”, followed by “4.0 nm +05^”, which means traffic has been detected, 4.0 nm (estimated) 500′ above and climbing, from your position. My instructor really likes it and I constantly hear him saying things like, “There he is!” as he spots the traffic the MRX has detected.
Within its user selectable (range and altitude) detection window [see diagam below], the MRX issues two levels of threat; an Advisory and an Alert. I won’t go into the specific differences between them, but in general the Alert is a more serious threat than an Advisory and indicates that traffic in closer proximity (than an Advisory). When you hear the 4-beep indication of an Alert, you really need start paying very close attention because traffic is extremely close. Typically, traffic will first be reported as an Advisory, and as it gets closer, if it gets closer, it becomes an Alert as it crosses the alert threshold. For specific information on the detection window and the Advisory and Alert thresholds, please consult the Zaon MRX manual available on Zaon’s web site.
