At long last, I am finished wiring the radio stack. I removed the backplates from the radio trays and bolted on the connectors and their backshells. Here's an inside view of one of the 430 backplates with connectors attached:
Here it is from the other side… the wire bundles are wrapped with silicone fusion tape to cushion them against the strain relief clamps.
The shield grounds all go to a card-edge connector that mates to a rib sticking out from the backplate casting. Seems to work okay, although it causes all the separate wire bundles to become inextricably tied together. A few product generations later, they switched to a different method of terminating shield grounds that I like better.
One of the audio panel connectors contains a "config module" (the small green thing in this photo) which is a little serial EEPROM that stores airframe-specific configuration data. The idea is that any changes you make to your audio panel configuration stay with the airplane, not the audio panel, so you don't have to re-configure things if you have to replace the unit. Since my overly fancy microprocessor-controlled audio panel requires you to connect a laptop to it to adjust certain settings, this may come in handy in the future.
The config module sits in a little pocket in the cast-aluminum connector housing:
I got the connectors and backplates for both 430s and the transponder installed, but I am stuck on the audio panel connectors for want of a handful of screws. I bet they're on my desk at work. Here you see the new style of connector backshell – it has threaded holes to which you attach the shield ground wires via ring terminals. This is a nicer way to do it, since multiple connectors on the same device can remain separate without their shield grounds getting all balled up.
