I am considering buying a plane with the Trimble Flight mate GPS in it.
Are these
reliable. Hard to use? etc. Any insight from Flite-mate owners would be
aprreciated.
Thanks
brucew5…@aol.com
30
Nov
Trimble-flite mate
In article <3171bl$…@search01.news.aol.com> brucew5…@aol.com (BruceW5540) writes:
>From: brucew5…@aol.com (BruceW5540)
>Subject: Trimble-flite mate
>Date: 27 Jul 1994 21:24:05 -0400
>I am considering buying a plane with the Trimble Flight mate GPS in it.
>Are these
>reliable. Hard to use? etc. Any insight from Flite-mate owners would be
>aprreciated.
I fly with one and find it very useful. Having an accurate ground track
readout (ground speed and course) is alone worth the price of such a unit,
especially for flying IFR.
Except for a problem with bounce in the Direct To key (see below), I have
never had the slightest glitch from our unit.
However, expect a significant learning curve for the manual inputs. Read
the manual thoroughly (Trimble will send you one for free) and practice the
entry protocols over and over.
A real annoyance and potential danger is the painfully slow sequencing
through the database, particularly for VORs for some reason. The first bad
experience I had with that was on my instrument long cross-country. I was
flying direct to the Madison (CT) VOR in IMC, using conventional
navigation. Wanting to impress my instructor with the accuracy of GPS, I
selected the SET TO command, carefully sequenced and cursored M-A-D into the
unit, and pressed the entry key. To my shock, the unit showed the VOR as
being south while my VOR receiver CDI was centered on east. I got so
distracted by this that my heading drifted off by 30 degrees. Then I
noticed that the distance to the database VOR was several thousand miles. I
shut the damn thing off! Back on the ground I discovered that there were
two other MAD VORs in the world, and of course the one I wanted came up last!
I can sometimes work around this problem by using the NEAREST mode to get
just the ten nearest fixes to sequence through. It’s tempting then to press
the Direct To key, but I’ve had that key bounce on me, turning my intended
action into double-click Save Current Position. It seems to happen at the
most stressful times.
Another workaround is to copy all the VOR and airport fixes you will use
into your user database (100 fixes). The offset and modify functions under
WAYPOINT facilitate making entries for intersections and NDBs.
Again, the unit is worthwhile alone for the ground track information. It
should be rated a definite plus in your buying decision.
Chris Floyd
:
I also ran into the problem of multible VORs with the same id. I thought it was
a bug in the data base so I called Trimble.
It turns out there is better way of getting to the actual VOR. I don’t have my
GPS anymore so I’m a little rusty on the procedure but it goes something like:
1) Select the VOR that you want
2) If the selection is not what you expected move the cursor to the
right past the last letter in the identifier
3) Select the up or down arrow until you get the correct VOR.
John
In article <chrisf.193.2E391…@mitre.org>, chr…@mitre.org (Chris Floyd)
writes:
- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -
> A real annoyance and potential danger is the painfully slow sequencing
> through the database, particularly for VORs for some reason. The first
bad
> experience I had with that was on my instrument long cross-country. I
was
> flying direct to the Madison (CT) VOR in IMC, using conventional
> navigation. Wanting to impress my instructor with the accuracy of GPS,
I
> selected the SET TO command, carefully sequenced and cursored M-A-D into
the
>unit, and pressed the entry key. To my shock, the unit showed the VOR as
> being south while my VOR receiver CDI was centered on east. I got so
> distracted by this that my heading drifted off by 30 degrees. Then I
> noticed that the distance to the database VOR was several thousand
miles. I
> shut the damn thing off! Back on the ground I discovered that there
were
> two other MAD VORs in the world, and of course the one I wanted came up
last!
Maybe limiting your database’s "Search Region" to United States only (in
setup) will fix that, assuming the two duplicate ID’s were not both in the
U.S.
–Mike
In article <31bps8$…@search01.news.aol.com> mike…@aol.com
(MikeCaz) writes concerning my problem in selecting a VOR by ID:
>Maybe limiting your database’s "Search Region" to United States only (in
>setup) will fix that, assuming the two duplicate ID’s were not both in the
>U.S.
This sounds like a much-needed improvement put into the Flightmate Pro that
my basic Flightmate does not have. Is that correct?
Chris Floyd