I was in Montreal most of the week, doing some avionics testing in the simulator. The paying customers get the good simulator slots, so we had the late slots, and finished late every night.

I went for a short RV-8 flight this morning. Plan A was to head to Ottawa to fly some instrument approach practice, but for some crazy reason Ottawa had a NOTAM:

CZUL DUE REDUCED SYSTEM CAPACITY AND ANTICIPATED DEMANDS, IFRTRAINING FLT AND VFR FLT ARE NOT AUTH IN THE OTTAWA TERMINAL CLASS DAIRSPACE.  INFO CTC 514-633-33651109181310 TIL 1109190200

So, I went down to Brockville instead. I was surprised to see the “GPSV” LED blinking on the autopilot when I flew the RVAV 04 approach, which meant the autopilot was receiving a vertical guidance signal, so I anxiously waited to see if it would couple up to the advisory vertical guidance for the approach. It did! I tried again at Smiths Falls, and it worked there too.

I had tried coupling up to the LNAV+V vertical guidance on the RNAV approach at Smiths Falls many months ago, and it hadn’t worked then, so I had assumed that the autopilot didn’t have that capability (the Trio docs weren’t clear on this at all). Then when I tried to do an LPV approach in Wisconsin in July, the autopilot wouldn’t couple up to the vertical guidance there either, which was clearly a problem, as Trio advertised that capability. I got some good advice from a Garmin guy who told me to change some of the GNS-430W data out settings, and the next LPV approaches worked correctly. It looks like that settings change also allowed it to couple up to non-LPV approaches with advisory vertical guidance. This is great news, as Garmin provides advisory vertical guidance on most RNAV approaches.