"Grumman-581" wrote in message
...
Gig 601XL Builder wrote:
The only time I really used it was on my solo x-c and the practice was
set it for the first
airport, fly there do my three landings at that
towered airport, land over at the edge of the
runway set the next airport, fly and repeat for
the homeward flight.

My LORAN has quite a bit more features -- that I never use, of course...
From what I understand, you can set routes that consist of multiple
identifiers (airports, intersections, VORs, etc)... I have never even
bothered to try out this feature... My personal flying style is just to be
interested in wherever my next destination might be and upon arrival
there, use the "direct-to" feature to set it to go to my next
destination...

Oh I'm sure the one in the R22 I trained in had lots of neat features that I
didn't know how to use.





The main thing I noticed was the lack of a CDI I would have preferred a
Nav/Com at the time. A nice uncertified 496 would have been great.

My LORAN does have a CDI-type indicator built into it... Basically a
vertical bar on the screen that indicates your desired course and another
vertical var that indicates your current position in relation to the
desired course... I find it interesting to fly the LORAN CDI indicator and
use StreetAtlas to draw lines between my source and destination airports
and then log my GPS data for plotting over this after the flight... I get
to see all the deviations that I make either from distraction, weather,
traffic, or because I saw something interesting that I wanted to check
out... On trips, I'll take this and add it to my electronic log book of
the flights...


This one had the same thing but it was in a position that was just about
useless in flight and it was kinda small that made it even worse. Since I
wasn't fly that high the best way I found to use it was start with it lined
up and find a ground reference off in the distance and fly to that then when
I got there look for the next ground reference. Pretty much just like you'd
use a compass only this one was only pointing to where I wanted to go.