PowerFLARM Eagle: installation, antennas, licences and range

A PowerFLARM Eagle is only as good as its antennas. The electronics inside are identical from unit to unit; the difference between a system that sees a converging glider at four kilometres and one that sees it at eight is entirely down to where the antennas ended up and what is sitting between them and the sky. This article covers the wiring, the antenna rules, the configuration portal, and how to check your real range once the panel is closed.

The theory of what FLARM is doing with those antennas is in the academy articles on FLARM and how FLARM works. What follows is the installation practice.

Mounting

The unit mounts on two M3 eyelets or in the optional mounting frame, which needs at least four screws. It must sit behind the engine firewall and needs no cooling. Keep more than 25 cm between the unit and the compass, and swing the compass afterwards. If the Eagle is your IGC logger, visible damage to the housing or a broken seal sticker can void a competition, record or badge flight.

Power

The Eagle wants 9–32 V DC, supplied through either of the two RJ45 FLARM data/power ports, or through the supplied power adapter. There is no fuse inside the unit, so an external fuse or circuit breaker is mandatory. A manually resettable circuit breaker is strongly preferred, because it lets you isolate this one device without pulling down everything else on the same bus; 3 A is the recommended rating.

Before you plug anything in, check the harness for shorts and confirm the crimps are tight. The Eagle has no power switch — it turns on the moment supply appears, and is typically operational within a minute given a decent view of the sky.

The two FLARM ports

Both ports are RJ45 and they are not equivalent.

The serial lines conform to RS-232C. Grounding both devices to airframe ground is not sufficient — an additional direct ground connection between the two devices is required. Any 6- or 8-pin 1:1 FLARM cable will work, but a 4-twisted-pair shielded cable is much better and carries both data wires, the ground reference and the supply in one run.

Never connect a CAN bus cable or a CAN device to the FLARM 1 or FLARM 2 RJ45 ports. The connector fits and it can damage the unit. The FLARM ports also source 12 V DC and are not protected against reverse polarity — a wrong cable can damage the display on the other end as well.

Some units carry an operation-mode slide switch on the underside, moved with a pen so it cannot shift by accident. In BLUETOOTH/WIFI mode the Eagle itself is the configuration device and FLARM 2 becomes output-only. In *FLARM2 mode that port is a full configuration interface and the WiFi portal cannot configure the FLARM module. Units without the switch run in a hybrid mode and accept both.

Audio

Audio comes out of a 3.5 mm jack and will drive an audio panel, an intercom or an external speaker of up to 5 W. The output level is set in the portal and then stays put.

Feeding an avionics audio panel — typically around 500 ohm input impedance — may need an impedance-matching transformer. A 1:1 transformer is available separately; 1:4 is the other common answer. Budget for this before you discover the warnings are inaudible under the headset.

Antennas: the part that decides your range

FLARM RF antennas

FLARM 1 is the main antenna. FLARM 2 is the optional second antenna for diversity. Use the supplied, marked antenna and screw it to the connector carrying the same marking.

The authoritative reference for placement, polarisation and separation is FLARM's own document FTD-041, the application note on FLARM antenna installation. Read it before you decide where the antennas go, not after the first competition where nobody saw you.

Diversity — using both antennas to fill each other's shadows — is a licensed feature, covered further down.

The GPS antenna

The GPS antenna screws to the SMA connector marked GPS on the back of the unit. Three rules:

1. Mount it horizontally, with the "GPS" marking facing the sky.
2. Never under a metal or carbon-fibre instrument panel or cover. Carbon is opaque to it.
3. Non-conductive covers are fine — glass fibre, glass, wood, cloth.

The supplied antenna is a high-gain active type with excellent reception, which is precisely why a poor position is so easy to get away with on a bench test and so expensive in the air. A 3D position needs at least four satellites; six or more is what you actually want.

Routing, and the check before you close the panel

• Avoid sharp bends anywhere in the bundle.
• Secure every wire so vibration works on the tie and not on the crimp.
• Keep the run away from high-voltage sources, and away from radio and transponder antenna cables.

Then, before the panel goes back on: power up and confirm the device is completely working. The Status page in the portal shows FLARM and GPS signal state as green or red, plus indicators that blink green as the antennas transmit and receive. Verify all of it while you can still reach the connectors.

The configuration portal

The Eagle raises its own WiFi access point on power-up, named LX FLARM Eagle plus the serial number. The network key is printed on the back of the unit. Join it from a phone, tablet or laptop and the portal usually opens by itself; if it does not, browse to 192.168.4.1.

The portal is the main interface for the whole unit: status, configuration, file transfer, logbook, traffic monitor and range analyser. System info splits into FLARM module, Eagle module, obstacle database and development detail — worth a screenshot before you call for support.

Note that the network module works either as an access point or as a client, never both. When the Eagle connects to your home WiFi to sync flights, the portal shuts down until it is finished.

Licences decide what the portal shows

FLARM settings in the portal go straight to the FLARM module. The same settings can be applied from a config file on a USB stick built with FLARM's own online configuration tool, or over the FLARM data port following FLARM's FTD-012 data port interface document.

Which settings appear at all depends on the module's features and the licences loaded into it. ADS-B ranges, for instance, only exist if the ADS-B In licence is present. Licences are separate products and are uploaded through the portal's Transfer page alongside firmware and the obstacle database:

• Diversity licence — enables the second FLARM antenna
• IGC flight recorder licence
• ENL flight recorder licence
• Garmin TIS licence

If a setting you expected is missing, check the licence before you suspect the firmware.

Verify your range from real flights, not from the ground

The Range Analyzer page is the only honest answer to "is my antenna installation any good?". A ground test tells you the unit powers up. It tells you nothing about what a carbon fuselage does to the pattern behind you.

The analyser plots the measured range of each antenna across 20 sectors of 18°, in green and blue, with a red line marking the minimum recommended range for that sector. A sector inside the red line is below the minimum recommended range in that direction.

It works from contacts: receptions from other FLARM-equipped aircraft. More contacts mean better statistics, so give it a busy weekend before drawing conclusions.

The catch is at the other end. If the recording period runs too long, a recent degradation — a chafed coax, an antenna knocked askew during a rigging, a new carbon panel — averages away inside years of good data and never shows up. Reset the statistics at least once a year at the annual inspection, and again after any change to the aircraft's equipment. An analyser that has never been reset is a history lesson, not an instrument check.

Flights, updates and the traffic monitor

The Logbook page lists recorded flights and downloads them to your device as .igc. The most convenient route is a USB stick: the FLARM module writes every finished flight to it automatically if one is inserted. Flights can also sync to LX Cloud, which needs the user Cloud ID entered in the system configuration first.

Each unit with IGC logger features ships with a factory barograph, on paper and stored electronically in the unit. The portal will download it as a PDF and will accept a new one after a later altitude test — but a new upload overwrites the old file, so download and store the existing one first.

The Traffic Monitor page draws a bird's-eye traffic view for testing or for when no dedicated display is fitted.

The Traffic Monitor page has no warning capability whatsoever. It shows traffic; it does not alert. It is not a substitute for a display in the panel.

When it goes wrong

Where to go next

• Firmware, obstacle database and manuals: the PowerFLARM Eagle download page.
• Antenna theory and why placement dominates: FLARM and how FLARM works.
• Hardware: PowerFLARM Eagle, FLARM antenna, GPS antenna with SMA connector, 1.5 m.
• Anything that does not match this article: your dealer first, then LX support.