In article ,
Ron Rosenfeld wrote:

On Sat, 17 Jan 2004 21:58:15 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:

I'm learning the CNX-80 my club just installed. One of today's tasks
was to load and fly a DP to make sure I knew how that worked.

Do you have a syllabus for learning this box? I'm in the process of having
one installed, too.

Unfortunately, no. It's one of the things I hope to develop as I learn
it myself. I would certainly start by ignoring the GPS functions and
learn the basics:

Comm: How to manually enter frequencies. How to adjust the volume
(don't laugh, we got caught by this the first time out; had the volume
set to zero and couldn't figure out why ground didn't seem to be hearing
our taxi requests). Once you are sure you know how to manually enter a
frequency (so you've got something to fall back on if all else fails),
then you want to explore the database functions, so you can pull freqs
out of the database (the keystroke series: Nearest-Airport-Info-Freqs
will become your friend).

Xponder: how to enter a squawk code and ident.

After that, I'd move onto the GPS stuff. First make sure you know how
to go direct to a random waypoint, then move onto entering flight plans.
I wouldn't touch approaches until you were sure you had the flight plan
stuff down pat.

The last thing I would do is get into how the Nav radio works. The
primary thing here is to make sure you know how to enter a localizer
freq, ident it, and switch the CDI from GPS to NAV mode.

I've got about 15 hours behind the box at this point. The first 6 were
my own checkout (I was getting checked out in a new plane at the same
time I was learning the CNX-80, so there was a double workload).
Perhaps it's a indictment of flight instructing in general, but by the
10 hour point, I already had 2 hours teaching it. I'm getting pretty
good with complex flight plans and flying stand-alone GPS approaches,
but I'm still getting caught up on occasion by unexpected problems in
unusual situations and I'm far from done exploring all the features.

We've got a pretty nice setup. CNX-80, SL-30, HSI, and Century-2000
2-axis autopilot. I'm just getting into learning how to fly coupled
ILS's (which has nothing to do with the CNX-80, per se). Now all we
need to do is add a turbo, oxygen, de-ice, stormscope, and a relief
tube, and we've have a really useful airplane!