09/26/2005 (2 hours):

There are a variety of locations to install antennae in a Cozy, and no "right" way to do it. The winglets are almost ideal for the COM antennae, the NAV can go in the canard/wing, and the transponder and GPS can go in the nose. This left me with the glideslope and marker beacon. I may never use these, but installing them is good practice for the more critical antennae installations, so I went ahead with them anyway.

Installation was relatively straightforward once I puzzled out RST Engineering's documentation. The only problem that I had was the toroids. For the glideslope these ended up along the centerline, which was fine - there's a thick layer of foam to dig into there. But for the marker beacon, the toroids do stick out above the foam a slight bit. I haven't figured out what to do about this yet, but the bump is very slight, and I suspect I can probably just fair it into the fuse bottom and call it a day. After all, some people actually hang external antennae on their birds!

I routed both lines away from the antennae fo 6 inches per RST's recommendations, then ran them together to the rear of the instrument panel, just to the pilot's side of the heat duct. This, again, is an area where there's no clear guidance from the plans, but it seemed like a good spot. Hopefully this won't be in the way of anything important. I actually drilled two separate holes to make the wires easier to identify later. Finally, I used flox, plastic sheeting, and weights to fix the coaxial antennae leads into the channels I prepared.

09/27/2005 (1 hours):

I did this only at select spots - the rest of the space will be filled with micro prior to glassing, which is lighter. There's no need for massive strength here. I potted the toroids in flox, too, and soldered the leads to the tapes. Tomorrow, I'll pot the leads in flox, too, to provide some rigidity around the critical solder connections.