AvidFlyer wrote:It's hard to beat the 96 series Garmin GPSs. I flew 6 years on a black and white 196 before upgrading to a 396. When I rented I used a yoke mount and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. In my home built its my sole means of navigation besides good ol fashioned pilotage.

+1
Simple but effective eh.
I have the 296, just installed a panel dock in the radio stack for it last night.

I recall a story about some testing their GPS when they first came onto the Aviation market. They were fairly notorious for their situational awareness, or lack of, and wanted to flight plan to Napier (NZNR) but in their innocence they entered NZNP into the unit, which seems about right but is actually New Plymouth on the opposite coast... you can guess the rest.

Emory Bored wrote:AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Get a damn Sectional, a decent time piece, and learn how to fly without all that crap! Then get a GPS and use it for backup. Make your checkpoints closer together until you learn how make sense of the land compared to the sectional. When nothing looks right for crying out loud, get some altitude and look around.


EB

Recently during a biannual flight review my instructor turned off the Garmin 430 for a 1 hour and 15 minute flight to the northwest corner of the state. Having to rely on good old pilotage, dead reckoning, landmark and VOR navigation to get me there caused me to realize how reliant I'd become on flying the magenta line and following the moving map in order to stay on track and out of airspace. I was glad to find out that I could still navigate using the basic techniques, and it was a reenforcing comfort to have the chart open right next to me. I'm not going to lie though, it truly was nice to have a moving map and magenta line as a "backup" for the trip home!

I also had an experience when I relied on the advanced technology of a fuel totalizer and put too much faith in what it was telling me during a long trip with my family! That's a story for another time, but let me just say it could have turned out a lot worse!

Don't ever forget the basics.

CW

Good thing all I know is basics. All I have is Sectionals, a compass, a pencil, a plotter, and a good time piece.

My lesson learned is make more checkpoints, don't spread em out so far. I had them as far as 50 miles apart. And make em easier to fine. Little dirt strips in the middle of nowhere are harder to find than a river or road like kevbert suggested.

All I wanted to know was if there was something like an app or a cheaper GPS to use as backup when i'm not finding the checkpoint. A little electronic piece of mind per se. I took Calculus II in college, but never knew if my math was 100% correct until it got graded or I ran it through my calculator. After the calculator or professor confirmed my math, I felt better about my answer.

I cant afford a fancy GPS, but I sure as hell can afford a Sectional. That's what I use and Ill use for a while. Ill get better as time goes on. More Checkpoints, More Checkpoints, More Checkpoints....

I agree with Gump that a pencil and map are the only reliable nav devices. In uneven terrain, topography is your best resource. In flat or swampy terrain, you have to figure out the variables available on the map. In III Corps in Vietnam you couldn't call artillery for friendlies unless you kept your finger on the map as you passed many differently shaped landing zones. The area you wanted to shoot up looked like many others on a flat pool table. You had to keep track from the time you left the fire base. Those French map makers must have put in thousands of hours on that. Nature will provide something, even in the desert. Stay low and memorize the shape of distant mesas and mountains. If unfamiliar, you can do a resection from two distant points. Peace of mind comes from knowing where you are, or finding out, every five miles or so. Also from reading town names on water towers. Build a fence. Once you have the angle on section lines (both N-S and E-W,) you have a true course that mirrors the pencil mark on your map. Perfect in the mid west, tougher in the west. However, that weird straight line of tumble weeds in a wind blown fence line is a section line that runs true N-S or true E-W. An then there are Spanish Land Grant areas that were surveyed NW-SE and NE-SW. Just close your eyes for a couple of minutes and you will be through it.