Value of marker beacon

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asicer

Touchdown! Greaser!
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asicer
We've had "value of dual VOR" and "value of DME" discussions, so now let's talk marker beacons.

Suppose the plane were going in for a panel upgrade and/or other avionics work:
  • If you had a working marker beacon receiving system, would you remove the antenna to cut weight and improve aerodynamics?
  • If one of the components were not working, would you have it fixed? Or would you remove the antenna and/or render the receiver inop?
  • If you had a receiver but not an antenna, would you install a new antenna?
  • If you didn't have a marker beacon system at all, would you install a whole new system?
 
If there is an antenna and the new audio panel had the feature I’d hook it up. I would not install a new antenna or fix if broken.
 
I aint no IR guy or nuttin' so factor that in.

I have it and I'm glad I do. It's nice when I go to the big kid airports that give me the straight in "Cirrus Style" approaches. If mine breaks I'll fix it. If I didn't have it I'd add it.
[Note: It wasn't there when I bought the plane and I did add it, so there's that]
 
When I installed my audio panel, I was going to connect the antenna only to discover that there's wasn't an antenna connection. Called PS Engineering and told me that since marker beacons were going the way of NDB's that they were starting to discontinue adding the receivers for them in their audio panels.

Not sure if any of their other audio panels don't have the receiver.
 
Getting ready to install 650 an 345 my Dme not working wx not working an should I take out adf what to do had hard time going with 650 or 750 in182 p
 
Most of the markers are decommissioned or being decommissioned when they fail. I have a modern OMI marker position capability. I paid $100 for the market beacon option with my new PSE 450A audio panel since the plane already had a good antenna. In my cross-country flying it never goes off. For the first time flying into Casper Wy last summer, the outer marker when off on final. Made me jump, and took me a couple of seconds to see it was a marker beacon.

I'd follow Jesse's advice above. Also there are a few airports that have them and if someone needed to fly under IMC conditions to those airports regularly I'd probably get one.

Eventually they will be 100% gone.
 
If it’s in there keep it working. It can be pretty handy and you never which combination of things might break. The more things in your bag of tricks the better. You never know when the time might come when you’re pleased to have that bag to dig to the bottom of.
 
As far as the marker beacons go, I rarely saw or heard ours go off. Not many left. Depending on airport YMMV.

As far as this goes... probably should start your own thread, @Tennis and work on making that into a readable sentence, but generally NDBs are going away. The GPS can substitute for DME, but as the OP said, we just had an entire thread on that. You can find it with the search function here.

Tennis said:
Getting ready to install 650 an 345 my Dme not working wx not working an should I take out adf what to do had hard time going with 650 or 750 in182 p
Click to expand...
 
IMHO, they provide zero useful information. No, I would not install or maintain one.
I would probably leave it alone if it's working unless I was doing a totally panel redo; then it would go the way of the ADF.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk
 
Since a MM that is inoperative no longer causes the landing minimums to be raised, most of the middle markers have already been removed.
 
Last edited:
denverpilot said:
As far as the marker beacons go, I rarely saw or heard ours go off. Not many left. Depending on airport YMMV.

As far as this goes... probably should start your own thread, @Tennis and work on making that into a readable sentence, but generally NDBs are going away. The GPS can substitute for DME, but as the OP said, we just had an entire thread on that. You can find it with the search function here.
Click to expand...

The GPS can substitute for the DME AS LONG AS THERE IS NO GPS SATELLITE INTERRUPTION! After you find yourself in the air with a satellite interruption your thoughts on this will likely change.

leaving your old tech stuff in place and functional when possible is NOT a bad thing.
 
MBDiagMan said:
The GPS can substitute for the DME AS LONG AS THERE IS NO GPS SATELLITE INTERRUPTION! After you find yourself in the air with a satellite interruption your thoughts on this will likely change.

leaving your old tech stuff in place and functional when possible is NOT a bad thing.
Click to expand...

He said his wasn’t working. Trash.
 
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