Blew $800 on a GPS antenna tester that told me nothing useful

Spent 3 hours chasing a bad coax on a Cessna 172 only to find the tester itself was giving false readings, has anyone else dealt with garbage calibration from those handheld units?

2 comments

2 Comments

charlie_ellis9d ago

Man, I feel your pain on this one. I dropped almost the same amount on a supposedly "pro grade" unit last year, and it ended up making me chase ghosts on a King Air for two whole afternoons (turned out the tester was reading a perfect cable as bad, so I replaced a perfectly good harness for nothing). There's something wrong with how these handhelds handle impedance matching, especially if you don't have them sitting on a perfectly level surface for 15 minutes like the manual annoyingly suggests. My buddy finally brought over his old Bird meter from the 90s and we found the problem in five minutes, makes you wonder if they even test these things before boxing them up. Nothing worse than trusting a tool that ends up being the actual problem, especially at that price point.

spencerfisher9d ago

Same here, my digital unit failed an impedance test on a known good coax, total junk.