About

I'm Matthew Hinkle, an avionics tech in Colorado. I build Squawk Talk myself.

Draft: add a few lines in your own words. How long you've been in the trade, the kind of work you do, and the fault or the new tech that made you start building this.

Why I built it

Reading a schematic and isolating a fault without swapping parts is a different skill from knowing the theory, and there are few safe places to practice it. Techs who've taken the big type-specific troubleshooting courses tell me those are some of the best training they've had. On the GA side there isn't much like that.

So Squawk Talk gives you a squawk, a wiring sheet and a meter, and makes you say what each reading should be before you take it. If you swap a good part, it goes on the bill.

What testers changed

Experienced techs pushed back early. A sim always has a smoking gun, they said, and real snags don't. Real damage comes from corrosion, wear, a screwdriver through a bundle, a clamp that never went back in.

They were right, so the higher levels now break things that way: a ground stud reinstalled over paint, a door post bundle chafing on a flange because the clamp at FS 112 was left out, a screw from a USB-port install crushing a 429 cable, a brand-new part that's bad out of the box. Some symptoms point at the wrong box on purpose.

It still won't replace time on the airplane or a good mentor. It's for the habits that come first.

Where the answers come from

Debriefs point to public FAA references a tech would actually open: AC 43.13-1B Chapter 11, the Airframe and General handbooks (FAA-H-8083-31B and -30B), and 14 CFR 43.13. Jobs are mapped to the mechanic ACS, FAA-S-ACS-1. No OEM manuals: the aircraft and wiring are fictional, and every debrief ends with "verify against the manufacturer's current data."