I have the Artex ME406, non GPS enabled (first gen). When the batteries expire at the end of the year, rather than spend $140 for new battery, I plan to upgrade to GPS enabled. I see the ACK is about $650 and then you need to tie it in with your GPS. My question, what ends up being the cost time and materials to your mechanic to do this on average - tie the ELT in to the GPS that is? If it starts running a -300-400 dollars, for a extra few hundred I might just buy the E.L.T. technologies elt that has its own internal GPS for I see chief has if for $1200 shipping included. So it looks like about $550 more for the E.L.T. with its own internal GPS. I start to wonder how much I would actually save by paying my mechanic to hook the ACK to my GPS, instead of just buying the internal GPS E.L.T. model? http://www.chiefaircraft.com/elt-406gps.html

Wouldn't have to deal with more wires running around and in my case having it plugged in to a portable GPS. Anyone running the E.L.T. unit ?
Russ

As I said in my post, my ME406 is among the very first sold. When I had my 430W installed last year along with a new PS Engineering audio panel, I was quoted the total, and then I asked about tying both the ELT and my EI fuel flow meter to the 430W--no extra charge.

Cary

I'm thinking that between the cost of the GPS enabled ACK 406 plus labor to tie it into my Garmin 396, testing etc. will be close to cost of the E.L.T. with built in GPS. I wasn't aware that the 1st Gen Artex ME406 could be tied to GPS? If they can, then what is with the big deal with the new Artex ME406 that are GPS enabled if the Artex ME406 have been able to link with GPS all along? Artex website makes no mention of the ME406 being GPS enabled. This ELT stuff always leaves me with more questions than answers.

Rhyppa wrote:I have the Artex ME406, non GPS enabled (first gen). When the batteries expire at the end of the year, rather than spend $140 for new battery, I plan to upgrade to GPS enabled. I see the ACK is about $650 and then you need to tie it in with your GPS. My question, what ends up being the cost time and materials to your mechanic to do this on average - tie the ELT in to the GPS that is? If it starts running a -300-400 dollars, for a extra few hundred I might just buy the E.L.T. technologies elt that has its own internal GPS for I see chief has if for $1200 shipping included. So it looks like about $550 more for the E.L.T. with its own internal GPS. I start to wonder how much I would actually save by paying my mechanic to hook the ACK to my GPS, instead of just buying the internal GPS E.L.T. model? http://www.chiefaircraft.com/elt-406gps.html

Wouldn't have to deal with more wires running around and in my case having it plugged in to a portable GPS. Anyone running the E.L.T. unit ?
Russ

Russ,

I looked pretty hard at that E.L.T. option prior to buying the ACK unit. My mechanic did all the wiring in a couple of hours. I'll bet that now, having done one, he could do it in less. I doubt that it should cost $500 to install one in any case.

Just as a note, the E.L.T. unit does NOT transmit on 121.5 mHz. The theory is that the GPS coordinates should be good enough for SAR to go right to you. Sounds like a good theory, but, as they say, shit happens. The 121.5 signal is still used to Direction Find the beacon by SAR. The 406 signal can't be DFed because it only transmits every 50 seconds.

MTV

The accident and threads that spawned this discussion motivated me to install an ACK E-04 ELT. Under supervision, I installed it, ran the wires, and installed the remote panel indicator. I ran the wire for the GPS interface, but haven't pinned it to the GPS. Gonna have that done at an avionics shop at the start of June. Took me three hours to install, but I had everything open for the annual.

My wife is getting a class tomorrow night on the new ELT. She is already familiar with the SPOT on our dash and the other one in my pocket. Both kids are also familiar with how to signal an emergency on the spot.

The thought of my wife and/or kids waiting helplessly for help that doesn't come is terrifying.

Brett

SAR crew I fly with doesn't have a high opinion of ELT's. Their recommend is something with tracking, like spidertracks or ISAT, and they like the SPOT that has built-in GPS and high survivability. One of the main drivers of 406 was to minimize the resources and time to track down inadvertent activation. The activation rate in an accident involving injury or death is pretty low.

Here's the stats:
NEW ZEALAND led the world when it mandated the use of
406 MHz Emergency Locator Transmitters late in 2007. At the
time, it was thought to be a break through in aircraft location
technology. Unfortunately though, ELTs have not lived up to their
potential in aviation. The underlying technology is sound – Personal
Locator Beacons and EPIRBs have a good record, but the ELT
has a fundamental flaw; it has to survive a crash to activate and
automatically transmit. Given the often violent nature of aircraft
accidents it’s not surprising that in New Zealand the records show
that ELTs fail in 86 per cent of incidents involving injury or death.
In the 82 such accidents between 1999 and 2008,
73 aircraft were carrying ELTs – but only 10 sent
a signal. This is not just a local issue; US accident
data puts the failure rate at about 75 per cent.

The 25% success rate is holding me off jumping to a new 406. I've had a few activations of the old 121.5 elt: A hard "takeoff" when I hit some mud on the takeoff roll (no damage), hard hovering auto with a student (no damage to that one either), and rolling down a mountainside after an engine failure during a pinnacle landing (damage on that one, though no injury). I don't think the 121.5 ELT is especially useful either, though it does check the boxes for legality.

Karmutzen wrote:The 25% success rate is holding me off jumping to a new 406.

If you're all dead, you wont care if you only have a 1 in 4 chance of it going off automatically...
If I am alive, the button is right in front of me on the panel.

SPOT and other similar alternatives do NOT have the same coverage in remote areas, through forest canopys, etc that you do get from ELTs and 406 devices, and were not designed exclusively for that purpose.... not to mention the annual ongoing cost. ELTs, Spidertracks etc (also available online like SPOT but with 406) are the items of choice around here. Be careful what you rely on.

Karmutzen wrote:SAR crew I fly with doesn't have a high opinion of ELT's. Their recommend is something with tracking, like spidertracks or ISAT, and they like the SPOT that has built-in GPS and high survivability. One of the main drivers of 406 was to minimize the resources and time to track down inadvertent activation. The activation rate in an accident involving injury or death is pretty low.

Here's the stats:
NEW ZEALAND led the world when it mandated the use of
406 MHz Emergency Locator Transmitters late in 2007. At the
time, it was thought to be a break through in aircraft location
technology. Unfortunately though, ELTs have not lived up to their
potential in aviation. The underlying technology is sound – Personal
Locator Beacons and EPIRBs have a good record, but the ELT
has a fundamental flaw; it has to survive a crash to activate and
automatically transmit. Given the often violent nature of aircraft
accidents it’s not surprising that in New Zealand the records show
that ELTs fail in 86 per cent of incidents involving injury or death.
In the 82 such accidents between 1999 and 2008,
73 aircraft were carrying ELTs – but only 10 sent
a signal. This is not just a local issue; US accident
data puts the failure rate at about 75 per cent.

The 25% success rate is holding me off jumping to a new 406. I've had a few activations of the old 121.5 elt: A hard "takeoff" when I hit some mud on the takeoff roll (no damage), hard hovering auto with a student (no damage to that one either), and rolling down a mountainside after an engine failure during a pinnacle landing (damage on that one, though no injury). I don't think the 121.5 ELT is especially useful either, though it does check the boxes for legality.

Yup, and the NZCAA are still mandating the installation while making a concerted effort to ignore the overwhelming advantages of Spidertracks or similar.

MTV, the 406 ELT's do indeed transmit on 121.5 as well for the purpose of direction finding. Some areas may only get a satellite pass every couple of hours. The unit might be happily punching out a nice 406 signal but no satellite overhead to receive it... Are you saying the unit you have doesn't?

The 406 units also need a more rigid mount than most of the factory 121.5 installations to meet the deflection requirements... Faster aircraft might need the high speed rod antenna... A C152 will need the antenna replaced every couple hundred hours due to some weird harmonics issue that causes them to fracture... The Artex ME406 will have a G switch fail every second test.... All = $$$$$$$.. And if you're lucky (unlucky..?), after all this it may have a 25% chance of working

I have a 121.5 ACK ELT and a SPOT GPS Messenger. I'll upgrade my old ELT when the law forces me to.

Put in an Emergency Lifesaving Technologies 406MHz ELT w/ built in GPS.

Installed antenna inside fuselage "cage" with antenna oriented to the sky while flying. Figured this configuration had a better chance of the antenna surviving a crash than an exterior mount.

Reason I went with this unit was it runs off aircraft power unless tripped, then goes to battery. As a result the gps is constantly updating while in flight and even if the aircraft ends up out of sight of GPS satellites the 406 ELT will transmit last gps fix, or last several positions if activated before being on the ground. In addition the antenna has a very wide output arc due to both horizontal and vertical signal orientation in case the plane does not end up upright.

I figure if I am going to pop for the expense I want to have something that has the best change of sending for help.

I also carry a 406MHz PLB in my flying vest.

Karmutzen wrote:The 25% success rate is holding me off jumping to a new 406.

I wonder how that would change if people were trained to hit the switch. The memory list I was taught was ABCDs

A: Airspeed
B: Best field
C: Engine (or other) Checklist
D: Declare emergency
s: Secure the airplane

It seems pretty reasonable to me to add "turn on the ELT" to the Declare portion.

The crop dusters here will point out that they don't have time for the ABCDs, and that's fine. I don't claim this solves every problem, but I do have to think it would substantially improve things over just the G-switch activating the unit.

I think hitting the dash mounted switch is great, but most crashes happen in take off and landing phase, and happen quick. I don't think in most instances with hands on stick props flaps throttles etc trying to avert disaster you will take your hands and eyes off of things long enough to find and trip the panel mount switch, if you even think of it in the high stress moment. the more I read about the very poor activation records of ELT's, the better spider tracks looks, hard wired, comes on when you power up the plane, default it to 1 min intervals, change it to 2 minutes once off and stabilized, back to 1 minute for landing phase.. I would keep my old 406, and I have a PLB, but the spidertracks would at worst put SAR within 2 minutes of flight time of me. Very worse case scenario they would be within 4 miles of me at 120mph, and worse case less than 2 miles in take off and landing phase. Russ

Agreed on almost everything you said. Yes the activation rate is poor. Yes spidertracks can substantially narrow the search. Yes the accident rate if we combine taxi/take-off/climb/approach/landing represents 92% of accidents. Only 8% occur in cruise.

All that said though, spidertracks is pretty damn expensive. For my flying in the past year it would have been at least $540. Probably a few dollars more. And that's a recurring cost, so assuming a ten year lifetime spidertracks is 2-4 times more expensive for what seems like a comparable solution. I think a PLB in my pocket and a willingness to hit the panic button on the ELT will be my approach.

I suppose it would depend on your usage. For the regular flyer plan - 7 hours per month, it is $180/year. 84 hours in a year is more than the average PP flies, but of course everyone's varies and some months you may go over - then $4.50/hour for overage. for 15 hours/month it would be $360/year, or 2 cases of cheap beer per month. If you go over 15 hours in a particular month, you would pay another $4/hour. Seems pretty resasonable to me. I already spend $600/year for my sat phone that I use less than 20 hours per year, sometimes less than 10 hours. I guess for me it falls into the category when you really need it its priceless. Almost all of my flying is with my 12 and 8 year old kids into remote areas of Canada. If a crash occurred, anything to get SAR to us as soon as possible is worth it. If I'm unconsious or worse, and kids were injured, would anyone be able to activitate the PLB's we all have on our persons? Would the kids be thinking straight enough to activate their PLB's if I couldn't assist them? I think I've convinced my self. I tried SPOT a couple of years ago, but it was just to unreliable to the point I just dumped the subscription. I still have 2 of them if anyone is interested. Russ

Rhyppa wrote:I suppose it would depend on your usage. For the regular flyer plan - 7 hours per month, it is $180/year. 84 hours in a year is more than the average PP flies, but of course everyone's varies and some months you may go over - then $4.50/hour for overage. for 15 hours/month it would be $360/year, or 2 cases of cheap beer per month. If you go over 15 hours in a particular month, you would pay another $4/hour. Seems pretty resasonable to me. I already spend $600/year for my sat phone that I use less than 20 hours per year, sometimes less than 10 hours. I guess for me it falls into the category when you really need it its priceless. Almost all of my flying is with my 12 and 8 year old kids into remote areas of Canada. If a crash occurred, anything to get SAR to us as soon as possible is worth it. If I'm unconsious or worse, and kids were injured, would anyone be able to activitate the PLB's we all have on our persons? Would the kids be thinking straight enough to activate their PLB's if I couldn't assist them? I think I've convinced my self. I tried SPOT a couple of years ago, but it was just to unreliable to the point I just dumped the subscription. I still have 2 of them if anyone is interested. Russ

So you say "anything to get SAR to us as soon as possible is worth it", but then you say you dropped SPOT. So clearly not "anything" is worth it, right? You've made an economic decision that SPOT isn't worth a couple cases of beer a month, but spidertracks is. I'm really only saying the same thing. I think that a PLB + 406 ELT with a panic button is a very good solution (I actually suspect it's as good or better than spidertracks, because I don't have a lot of confidence in Iridium) and that the value of having spidertracks as a backup isn't worth the 500-600 a year to me (I fly 200+ hours a year and would also go over the monthly limits occasionally). So we're really saying the same thing, there are limits to what it makes sense to spend money on. I'm just choosing a "free" solution that requires me to flip a switch to dramatically increase my odds as the baseline instead of a subscription based one that doesn't.

I plan to upgrade to GPS enabled 406 at annual in a couple weeks but currently fly with 121.5 and PLB. I am convinced that 406 activation could significantly improve the odds that I or a passenger in my 170 could be rescued from a survivable crash in the wilds of Alaska before the ice weevils get us.

However, my main point in posting is to say that up 'till fall 2012 I used a GPStracker ap on my phone that provided a free tracking device that worked throughout most of southcentral Alaska. Yes it used the cell network and was inherently limited for the type of mountain flying that we enjoy, but it left a trail of tracking waypoints to where I left cell covereage and to me that meant my wife and/or SAR could start that much closer to my crater if I didn't show up again. I posted the link to the Instamapper tracking data in my master flight plan with Flight Service, and then I confirmed with Kenai Flight Service that they could (and would) use the link to view my tracking data in an overdue flight plan situation. Unfortunately the GPS tracker service was shut down last fall and I haven't found a suitable alternative. I would like to see a smart-phone based tracking system using something like the DeLorme inReach Satellite Communicator to work in remote areas and at no recurrent cost.

BeeMan wrote:I posted the link to the Instamapper tracking data in my master flight plan with Flight Service, and then I confirmed with Kenai Flight Service that they could (and would) use the link to view my tracking data in an overdue flight plan situation.

This is a very good idea! Put the spidertracks/spot/other link in your flight plan, then if something happens the people paid to look for you also know that information instead of just friends and family.

Not picking a fight. I dropped SPOT because I had so few good pings that I felt it was less than useful. I figured if someone went to my last successul SPOT ping that occured an hour ago and 120 miles back in my rear view mirror and focused their search there, they may be waisting time and resources that could be used further down my likely route of flight. Also I had repeated difficulties trying to get the unit to function correctly, staying on, sending out the signal, etc. Finally, the customer service - if you can call it that- was flat out rude and dishonest from SPOT. I'm not going to rehash the SPOT no SPOT, as there are plenty of threads on here regarding that, including a bunch of mine. My focus here is paying for a tracking service device/subscription versus purchase of a GPS enabled 406 ELT. If SPOT is the tracking device some chooses due to cost, then that is their choice. The price I pay to assist SAR find my kids is not the issue AS LONG AS IT IS RELIABLE. In my plane, in the parts of the continent I travel, SPOT didn't meet my criteria of a useful accurate and reliable tracking service, thus I dropped it. For others it apparently works well, and that's good for them. Also, in case I wasn't clear, I already have a non GPS enabled 406 ELT with the panic switch on the panel in my plane. I know during a couple of interesting take off's and landings I have had that could have ended up not so well, there was no way in the world I would have reached over and hit that switch. All of my flying is on floats, so a take off or landing situation may well put you in the water with the GPS submerged in a plane that is upside down, and probably unable to transmit. My only real selection is to go to the GPS enabled ELT, a tracking service, both, or neither. A reliable tracking service would show your take off run and then no corresponding pings in flight, and I would think would send SAR immediately to that point even without ELT activation. But that would depend on someone occasionaly monitoring at home, which if I understand correctly you can set Spider to send texts/emails everytime movement begins or stops, or goes through a certain airspeed perameter.

Rhyppa wrote:Not picking a fight.

Understood. I hope I didn't come across that way either. Thinking people can value different things and come to different conclusions on this subject.