The instruments to do those measurements are not expensive, about the
price of a set of landing lights from the Kill-a-cycle guy. So if you
want to make a hobby out of LED nav lights it might be interesting to
do. I've looked over what the Kill-a-Cycle guy is doing and he seems
to have done all the leg work for you and will even let you save some
money by doing your own soldering if you'd like.

Having said that, I would have done a few things different than he did
however to simplify the design and increase the efficiency.

1) You don't need regulators (or a slew of them) on the board, a stack
of light emmiting diodes and a resistor IS a regulator of sorts and
will do just fine in this application. Real light bulb nav lights
vary with supply voltage more than these ever will.

2) Partially because he went with the on board regulation, he gave up
the opportunity to provide a 14V/28V solder jumper to save power in
the 28V case. The current design just eats those extra 14V as heat
when used in a 28V system. In other words the 28V lights are 50% less
effiecent than the 14V application. But they both kick incadescants
butt for efficiency.

Regs- As is common in engineering, the spec is sometimes written AFTER
the design is completed, so they're basically just describing a sample
system that they like the performance of. So the reg as I rememebr
was very particular about intensity over angles, but for color just
said "red" and "green". So the real nav lights bleach out on the sun
and get more and more white over the years, while the LED sources will
give very pure (saturated) colors that do not change with time, but
you don't get any credit for having good color. You just have to use
a bunch of LEDs to make as much light as a light bulb behind a color
filter.





-Jim, is it feasible for an average builder to integrate any of these LED
-components into nav lights that will have acceptable performance?
-Perhaps a Kitplane article to help all us electronically-challenged
-builders?