Garmin 480 Questions

azure said:
The discontinuity is one of the "quirks" that I agree the 480 has. I think it doesn't know how you want to go from your present position to ADDLY, or else you're too far from the direct line from your departure point to ADDLY for the course to be active. But if you're still flying to KSOP after deleting the discontinuity, you haven't EXEC'd the modified flight plan.
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Okay, you got that part right. Didn't hit exec. The discontinuity thing sure is annoying though.
 
dell30rb said:
No doubt it works just fine, but it took more time for me to learn than the others.

There are still some things I'm working on figuring out with the 480. Say I have plugged in a flight plan from KTTA to KSOP. Halfway there, I go into my flight plan and select the GPS 23 approach for my destination, with transition ADDLY. It adds this to my flight plan, but puts 'discontinuity' between KTTA and ADDLY. So I delete the discontinuity. The box still wants to fly direct to KSOP. Then I hit 'direct' select ADDLY from my flight plan, hit 'direct' again and now I am finally flying the approach.

Is there an easier way to do this.
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There's a discontinuity because your flight plan previously entered doesn't connect to the initial fix. You can do a few things.

1. You can just clear the discontinuity by selecting it and pressing clear. A new segment between the previous fix and the initial approach fix is inserted.

2. You can go DIRECT to the initial if that is consistent with your clearance by selecting it in the flight plan and pressing DIRECT.

3. You can just ignore the discontinuity and assume that that you're going to get a vector or cleared to a fix later on and not worry about it.

The only real problem with #3 is that for some goofy reason (OK, this is a quirk), the system seems to budget a LOT of time for the discontinuity so if you're using ETA or fuel estimation, etc... For this reason, I tend to do #1 even if I'm not going to fly that way so the ETAs are more realistic.
 
dell30rb said:
Okay, you got that part right. Didn't hit exec. The discontinuity thing sure is annoying though.
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Two of the most important things to remember about the 480 are:

1: You must hit "Exec" to get almost any change in the flight plan to take effect.

2: You generally need to hit "EDIT" prior to making any changes to the flight plan.


If you understand the basic architecture of the 480's flight plan mechanism this makes a lot of sense. The 480 maintains two operational flight plans (in addition to the 50 stored plans) and they are called the "Active" plan and the "Modified" plan. This arrangement allows the user to make multiple revisions to the flight plan without affecting the unit's ability to provide navigation per the original plan until the modifications are complete.

You might notice that the "EXEC" function key shares it's location with the "EDIT" function key and this is important if you want to understand the behavior of the two flight plans. Whenever you press the EDIT function key the 480 copies the active flight plan to the modified one and opens the "Modified" (it's not really modified yet) plan for editing. At that time the EDIT key turns into the EXEC key. The same thing happens when you select a procedure (departure, arrival, or approach) and press Enter and this is important to remember as well because it means that unlike the 430W, WRT navigation nothing changes when you add a procedure until you "Execute" the change. As a result you can add a procedure and view the effect on the plan without worrying about where the navigator might send you before you've confirmed your alterations are what you really wanted.

Related to all of this are two rather similar messages that pop up when you execute or edit (sometimes) a plan. One asks if you want to "Replace (the) Active (plan) with (the) Modified (plan)?". This one shows up whenever you press the EXEC key to confirm that you really want to switch to the new plan (kind of like the Windows dialog: "Exit Y or N?"). The other message "Replace Modified with Active?" only appears if you attempt to edit the Active plan a second time while the Modified plan is open.
 
That is a good one. To bad the audio gets bad.
 
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