Misc Fuselage Work - Data Plate, MFD

TLDR

• Installed MFD
• Installed Data Plate

Details

Data Plate

I finally received my permanent registration card from the FAA.

I compared the writings on the registration and the data plate’s writing. Everything looked correct. I drilled 2 small holes on the side of fuselage and put the data plate on.

The data plate was made from stainless steel. Out of caution, I applied some tef-gel on the plate to prevent dissimilar metal galvanization.

MFD Installation

I also installed the MFD (another G3X) on the instrument panel.

The PFD was running v9.51. The MFD was much older but I don’t know what version it was running. I was pretty sure they were not on the same version, so they could not communicate with each other.

So the first step was to upgrade the PFD software version. I downloaded the latest version from flyGarmin (v9.52) to an SD card and pushed it into the card slot on the PFD. The upgrade was about 20 minutes and pretty uneventful, which is a good thing.

After the PFD upgrade, I plugged in the MFD. Fortunately the wiring harness was already done for me by Midwest Panel Builders, so there was no wiring mess to deal with this time. After powering up, as expected the MFD was running a pretty old version (9.13) and showed a red cross on CAN bus. I performed the same upgrade process on MFD. Once it rebooted, it started to communicate with the PFD and both screen seemed to work.