GNS430 - thickee's guide

[Fright Level]

Try as I would, I just couldn't get the autopilot to accept commands from my screwed up half mil chart

[BackPacker]

COM & NAV each have a knob of their own to tune frequencies. Inner knob for decimals of freqs., outer ring for units. Push on the respective inner knob to disable squelch/enable morse ident.

Top knob is for COM, knob below for NAV. Each has an adjacent boxed area on the screen showing the frequency in use & a standby freq. The tuning knobs enter the frequency into the standby area.

A button to flip-flop active standby freqs. is next to each freq. display box.

Not quite correct, as I recall. There's only one knob to tune both the COM & NAV standby frequency, and this knob has an outer and inner ring as usual. To switch between tuning COM and NAV (the standby frequencies), *press* this knob once. To flip-flop between the active and standby frequency, both COM and NAV have their own dedicated flip-flop button. And both NAV and COM have their own little volume knob as usual (with pull to disable squelch/enable ident), and I think the COM volume is the one which can also turn the whole unit off.

But it's the combined COM/NAV frequency selection knob and the non-intuitive way of switching between COM and NAV frequency selection which still gets me from time to time.

Something else which caught me out. I had painstakenly inputted an eight-leg flightplan and activated it, before starting the engine. Avionics master off, start engine, avionics on. Flightplan gone. Bugger. Had to do the whole thing again in the air. (Fortunately I had a computer wiz passenger.) To retain a flightplan across a power cut you actually have to save it in one of the twenty or so available slots.

Great piece of kit, but you need to spend some serious time learning it. And, as said, better do that using the sim than running the aircraft battery down.

[Fright Level]

Davids link to the FAA site is good. It opens two small media player windows, one with Tao-Knee from the Bronx describing the operation and the other a Powerpoint presentation. With the simulator running in a third window, it's an easy job to learn the 430/530 operation.
Apologies in advance to the FAA presenter, but the heavy NY accent is a little like an episode of the Soprano's