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AERA 660 mount help

Brdog42

Well Known Member
Hello,

I?m going to mount my 660 to the instrument panel with the bare wire harness. Avoid heat and better GPS signal than an AirGizmo dock? But the cable would make a 90* from the mount to another 90* bend to pass through the instrument panel. When I put that bend on the cable, I feels like I?ll have problems doing that. What has anyone else done?

Tim
 
I had a "spare" 3 1/8 inch panel hole with a blank filler plate. I mounted the Garmin 660 bare wire mount onto the plate. For the cable pass through I cut a notch in the edge of the plate, deep enough to clear the panel hole opening, and sized to accept a small snap bushing that just fit the mount's signal cable. It all just fit and looks professional.

Now, a word of caution. At the end of the cable, where the individual wires are exposed, I used a solder sleeve to terminate the cable end. DO NOT USE A SOLDER SLEEV. When I used the heat gun to attach the solder sleev, the heat and melted solder melted the insulation of the individual wires and shorted them all together. I cut off several inches of this now ruined end, striped out additional wires and used heat shrink tubing. That worked fine.
 
Thanks!

Thank you guys very much.
SuperCubDriver, I PMed my email address for any photos you will send.

Tim
 
I had a "spare" 3 1/8 inch panel hole with a blank filler plate. I mounted the Garmin 660 bare wire mount onto the plate. For the cable pass through I cut a notch in the edge of the plate, deep enough to clear the panel hole opening, and sized to accept a small snap bushing that just fit the mount's signal cable. It all just fit and looks professional.
I did this as well, minus the snap bushing. For the notch in the edge of the plate, I cut it as a longer oval, so the cable would go in at a more gentle angle and make a larger radius curve hidden behind the panel. Then I carefully rounded the edges of the openings so they wouldn't chafe on the cable.

This worked well for 6 years with an Aera 500, before moving to the 660.
 
I like surface mounting the Aera 660 to the front of the instrument panel too, using the supplied standoffs and running the wire through a small hole in the panel. Another advantage of surface mounting is that you quite often will not need a remote antenna.

Another option is to mount a ball mount to both the bare wire mount and the instrument panel, and use a small adjustable arm.

The hole pattern on the bare wire mount matches the ball mount hole pattern making it easy to attach. When you use the portrait orientation like I do, the wire hangs out the bottom and then exits through the hole in the panel so it is very clean looking. The release button is on the bottom right in this installation which also works very well. I had an open round instrument hole that I created a blank for and attached the ball mount, so I didn't even need to drill holes in my panel. The flexible arm gives you the ultimate flexibility in adjusting the viewing angle to be perfect. Mine is located next to the side of the fuselage up high in the instrument panel where it doesn't block anything else.

I have a tandem aircraft, so I mounted a second ball mount in the back seat to make it easy to add an Aera 660 back there when I have a passenger. The Aera 660 in the back can Bluetooth link to the GDL 52R and receive traffic, weather, attitude, and even control the SXM music choices.

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