In one of the Switzerland threads, someone questioned whether the autopilot could fly an SD route.
This may be old news to many, but I have just come across the feature in SD that allows you to output in GTN format. That can go on the FPL directory on your datacard to be imported to GTN, and then used to drive the autopilot.
So, using a very slightly convoluted method, SD routes can, indeed, drive the autopilot.
Sorry if I am teaching people to suck eggs.
How are user waypoints represented in the data sent to the GTN?
What happens if a named waypoint (e.g. ORTAC, SFD) in the data is same as one in the GTN but with [possibly minutely] different coordinates?
Do coordinates of the named waypoints get sent over?
These are traditional old issues; they existed with Navbox to [whatever GPS] transfers, in different ways.
How do you transfer the SD route to the GTN?
One (new) possibility is to press the “Share” button in the “Route” menu, and select “Send to Garmin Pilot” – from there if you have Flightstream, you can just beam it to your GTN.
Peter wrote:
How do you transfer the SD route to the GTN?
Possible confusion as SD stands both for SkyDemon and SD card. I will refer to them unambiguously:
Nevertheless, there appears to be no way for an autopilot to fly a route directly from Skydemon – or any other tablet based satnav program. AFAIK it has been done on homebuilts, with various autopilot interfaces being available. Even the ancient Oziexplorer has an “autopilot output”, via RS232.
Has anyone tried to establish any answers to my post above (duplicate waypoints)?
I uploaded 20+ SD routes to my GTN a while ago. The file format seems to upload lat/long with a name.
Most worked fine, if it doesn’t recognise somewhere it locks the waypoint and you have to resolve the issue before using it if I recall correctly. The manual has details of potential issues, section 4.6
Peter wrote:
Has anyone tried to establish any answers to my post above (duplicate waypoints)?
If Flightstream is used with Foreflight, then user waypoints will always be represented by their lat/lon coordinates.
Don’t know how Skydemon handles that though, but my guess is it works similar. It would be a major bug to send a user waypoint as a three-letter navaid only because its label coincides with the identifier of that navaid.
Yes, especially when some people add waypoints with a 3 letter identifier.
I had someone put in DET at about 25nm away from the DET VOR. I found out when in autopilot (and rushed a bit when doing my Direct to, lesson learned!)
Or if you send a route with ORTAC in it but the lat/long in the target GPS’s ORTAC is not quite the same – which is virtually assured with a floating point number representation.
Does that Import procedure also work with the G1000?
