smoked out

Had to get out of town because smoke from the Camp fire has gotten so bad we could hardly breathe in our own home. Can't go outside, can barely see across the street... my chest is tight and burning eyes.. horrible. They finally canceled the schools and it took me all of 5 minutes to throw some clothes in a bag and say "let's get the F out of here"... Norcal is hell right now. 

luckily Tbone also stands for "The Big Out Now Escape" machine. Loaded up the wife, kids and dog and blasted off into darkness and smoke with < 1 mile vis. I've got a lot of screens though...

Plenty of room in the Big bone and the dog gets his own seat. Took an hour of flying before I could make out some ground lights and was finally clear of the muck. Who goes to LA for fresh(er) air? I do!

New audio panel

Begone Garmin GMA 340 audio panel, and welcome PS Engineering PMA 450!  I never thought much about audio panels until I flew with my buddy in his Cessna 210 with a PSE Engineering panel.  The sound quality was so much better, so crisp and clear.  The difference is like a noise canceling headset vs passive, which is to say quite significant!  The other issue I wanted to address was the Garmin 340 has no dedicated inputs for music.  That prompted the prior owner to wire the XM audio into the ADF monitor function.  Not ideal!  I couldn't change the volume for different locations, and it just generally sounded crappy.  

The unit has some nice features, like bluetooth input and dynamic sound where you can set the copilot voice to seem like it's coming from your right side.  All sweet, but my primary motivation was simply better sound quality and it's definitely much better.  It was a simple swap.  I still need to have an avionics shop rewire the music input properly, but I got the radio installed myself in all of 2 minutes.  You just unscrew the hex nut for the 340 and slide it out, and slide in the 450 and screw it in.  Got a great trade up deal from Chase from Avionics Source, whom I also purchased my Avidyne's from.  Great guy/company, highly recommend! Here she is, looking good under the IFD 550.