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Fuselage February 2008 Updates February 20, 2008 SL-30.... - 2.0 hrs Started working on the PTT switch on the Ray Allen Stick Grip. I am going with the simple G101 grip with just the PTT switch to keep it simple. I soldered up the switch. Not sure if I will mount the one on the co-pilot side. May just put the co-pilot switch on the panel. Tested the switch on the pilot side PTT wire and I got a loud squeal. Not good. I emailed Tim at FastStack for any ideas and he suggested I check the mic jacks for a grounding issue. Jon came over to help me figure it out. I showed him the issue and we started with removing the co-pilot side mic jack and ohmed it out. Things looked ok so we tested it while not installed in the plane by plugging in my Bose headsets. Transmit worked perfect. Jon suggested we put some heat shrink around the entire connectors to prevent anything from touching since the jack is so close to the side of the fuselage. After we got all 4 connections, mic and headsets fixed and remounted we tested again. Perfect. Now I noticed I had unplugged my new Halo set during the testing and tried it. The squeal came back. I then remembered that when we started removeing the jacks I removed both headsets, Halo and Bose. When I started retesting I used the Bose and my older David Clark. So now it looks like the Halo was the issue all along. I called Halo and the guy said that he is just starting to see this issue arise and that he is meeting with an engineer this weekend to see if they can resolve it. He said its an issue with the proximity of the antenna and the headset. Now that is strange because I know plenty of folks using the Halo with the same antenna position as me. I checked VAF for anyone having an issue and found several folks using the Halo with the SL-30 even though there are also many folks using the Garmin 430 and many of those are using the SL30 as a 2nd radio. Anyway we will have to wait until Monday to call him back and find out the engineering finding. This website was built to document my work in compliance with the FAA requirements needed to certify my aircraft. My experiences and comments are by no means to be considered as instructions on how to build any aircraft.