Installation of the ELT seemed straight forward, not even requiring a blog post. The only semi-difficult task involved stripping and soldering four small wires onto an electrical connector. The hook up was done by following the instructions in the KAI and looking at the diagrams in the booklet which came with the ELT from AKC. All the wires and the unit itself along with the enunciator box and a mysterious RJ-11 connector, were then neatly zip tied onto the ELT tray previously installed. Easy peasy, I thought. One of the previously installed wires, an RJ-11 phone wire, goes from the display/switch unit on the instrument panel back to the ELT behind the passenger seat. When everything was hooked up, the enunciator box starting emitting a ticking sound and a red light on the display unit on the instrument panel started to flash. A call to ACK revealed that the RJ-11 wires and connectors are either straight through (polarity preserved) or crossed (polarity reversed). According to ACK, they should all be straight through, but on all Van's aircraft the long wire from the instrument panel display unit back to the ELT is always crossed. Something needs to un-cross the wire. It turns out that the previously mentioned mysterious RJ-11 connector was supposed to be crossed, thereby fixing the problem. Mine was not. Amazon's aviation department to the rescue. Problem solved. I waited until the big hand on the clock was straight up, activated the ELT, tuned my hand-held radio to 121.5, and was rewarded with the irritating peyow, peyow, peyow sound that an ELT makes.
Build delayed by more broken bones: A while back in North Carolina I fell on my bicycle, breaking my left femur and having a titanium rod installed from the ball joint to just above my knee. This joined titanium already in that leg from the knee to the ankle. The Spousal Unit and I always go roller skating each Monday night at a local rink. Confirming the expectations of my friends, I'm now recovering from surgery to install a titanium plate in my left wrist, fixing one of the most common roller skating injuries (broken wrist). It's hard to work on the airplane one-handed.
Off topic: more Colorado wildlife
When I moved to Colorado from North Carolina, I often said that I wanted to see a Mountain lion in the wild. Since arriving I'd seen bears, bobcats, moose, thousands of elk but no mountain lion.
A couple of months ago the Spousal Unit awakened me at the butt crack of dawn, telling me to come see a mountain lion eating an elk behind the house. Pretty exciting but a couple hundred yards away.
Then a trail cam on my back patio got a picture of one much closer to the house.
Then this. Probably the same guy trying to cover a deer less than 100 yards from my front door.
