Garmin GTX 330 intermittent IDENT fault

[Eric Lehto]

So twice in the past two months, at two different airports, when asked to ident, the controller reports that he doesn't observe it. Luckily both times the traffic was pretty light and they were able to pick me out of the clutter based on my reported position and altitude.

Being an intermittent problem, I assume it's going to be difficult for the avionics shop to replicate. When I called, they said they no longer had a dedicated bench test technician, so they'd prefer to trouble shoot it while installed. Then I mentioned it was running an ancient SW revision (4.04), so they decided it may make more sense to just deliver the transponder to them for troubleshooting and SW update.

Anyway, I tried researching the change history of the software on Garmin's website to see if this was a problem that was previously identified and corrected. I wasn't super successful.

Any chance someone here knows of any previously identified issues with the IDENT functionality on the GTX 330?

 

[Jesse Saint]

Does the transponder show Ident, but ATC doesn’t see it, or does it not show ident? If the transponder doesn’t show it, the button could be bad and a remote ident button could be installed.

 

[Eric Lehto]

Thanks for the feedback Jesse. I actually went up this afternoon and thought to look for that. But of course, today the controllers saw my flash. I'll be sure to keep my eye on it!