Use of Garmin 530/430/Sandel package

[Big Pistons Forever]

I will be flying a friends C182 with a new Garmin 530 and 430 (no Wx Link,TAWS or TIS though ) linked to a Sandel Electronic HSI and coupled to a STEC 30 A/P. Any advice from pilots who have flown a similar setup would be appreciated, particularly best practices for setup in Dep/Enroute/ Arr phases of flight.

Thanks.

[bookworm]

The manuals for both are available online.

Make sure you know how to set up the pointers/CDI on the Sandel. It's not hard but worth getting right before you launch.

It's unforunate that you can't display the track output from the GNS430 on the Sandel. It's very much worth ensuring that you have it set as a data field on the GNS430 display.

[AlphaGolfLima]

yes, gotta agree: get the manuals !
Not only the Garmin manuals are freely available but also
the Sandel HSI manuals. Also Garmin offers free CBT (computer based training)
programs for their GNS 430/530 - it's about 20 megs I think, but
WELL worth downloading it if you haven't got any experience
with the setup itself or the GPS hardware in particular.
Just go to their webpage and get the stuff - you certainly don't
want to "learn" how to use that stuff while flying - do you ? ;-)

I am also sure you can find the autopilot docs somewhere -
just do some googling :-)


regs

AGL

[Big Pistons Forever]

I have allready down loaded the Sim and have the OEM manuals. The Garmin manual is not bad , but the Sandel POH is tragic. In any case like most manuals they were undoubtably written by a computer geek engineer not one of us dumb pilots.
Since there is about a billion possible ways to configure the system I was hoping for some practical advice from those who had actually used the boxes.

[bookworm]

BPF

Here's a specific suggestion then.

Make sure you have the Sandel configured to have a bearing pointer (RMI-like arrow on the Sandel) on the GPS waypoint. The course pointer CDI is all very well, but when the GPS is in ENR (rather than TERM) mode, it has a very coarse resolution -- is it 1 mile per dot? You can get a long way off course before noticing a fairly significant error in the heading you've chosen. Not a major problem on a 100 mile airway leg, but more serious when you're trying to do something a little more delicate.