>input. It's quite different from the traditional designs that use the turn >coordinator or the attitude indicator to control the roll axis.
What really attracted me to the Digitrak was its simplicity. The interface is about a simple and elegant industrial design. You can't get more simple than a heading display and two buttons. Also, it is kind of revolutionary in that you don't need all the usual expensive and complicated instrumentation of the typical general aviation aircraft to navigate. The minimum requirement is actually a Garmin 35 antenna that has a built in receiver and provides ground track and ground speed. The Digitrak will follow whatever heading you enter into the display using that data. I also like the idea of how simple it becomes when you bring everything into the digital domain and drive the flight controls with stepper motors. It's really fascinating and offers a lot of potential for making autoflight possible on nearly any aircraft (I can think of how it might apply to a Personal Air Vehicle, which has to navigate itself or be very simple for an ordinary person to operate). Also, one of the stated features is that it does not rely on a turn coordinator and as such makes claims of better turbulence handling. This is one of the areas I am hazy on, how it actually works. It was easy to model in MSFS, I just connected the heading display to the heading but and to the GPS autopilot. That's cheating. The Digitrak has a built in DG and a magnetometer, which I believe is used to sync (correct automatically) the DG to the compass heading. It also states the DG is slaved to the GPS, which I take to mean it can make the same correction using the GPS or perhaps it only means it syncs the DG with the selected heading. Apparently, you can fly the heading by DG when there is no GPS signal. The modes are GPS NAV, which keeps a heading with ground track data, a GPS flight plan mode that automatically follows waypoints if the GPS sends a waypoint to it, and the magnetic DG. I would like to model this without using the turn coordinator as input. Again, I am long winded, but there are many oddities about this autopilot that need pointing out. Thanks for the advice. I'll read it and get back to the list. >Are you using version 0.9.8 or CVS? I am using the 0.9.8 Windows XP binary. Steve _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d