NetHeads, I took Wednesday afternoon off to fly to my father's farm for a visit. After takeoff I noticed my GPS was still flashing a big question mark rather than my plane's location, but I figured I knew the way and forged on south. I played around with it for a few minutes to see if I could correct the situation, but it never did figure out where it was. So I dug out the sectional to see if I could still follow my usual flight path. I did a lot more zig-zagging around than usual, but made it there and back without any problems. Before takeoff on the return trip, I plugged my laptop into the $40 "on-board" GPS that's installed in the plane, and using the APIC software that I have on the laptop, gained all the GPS functionality back again, although it's a lot clunkier on a laptop than the panel mounted GPS!
Despite the floundering flight path, I managed an overall fuel economy (including takeoff, climb, and one go-around because I was going too fast on final) of 38 mpg, and flew at about 160 mph TAS (true airspeed) during cruise. Since I didn't bother refueling down there, it made measuring the amount of fuel burned very easy, and provided a check on what the fuel totalizer said I'd burned. Not a bad trip, and I got to visit with my father for four hours. I love this time machine! After finding the manual on the web, I went out to the airport late yesterday to see what I could do with the GPS. I did a reset on it (which lost all of my settings), but it immediately fixed the problem. Since that only took a minute, I decided to fly a little, and snapped the picture at the top of http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/sunsets/ . I've taken better sunset pictures, but this one will do. This weekend I'll replace the brake pads (although they don't need it, despite braking for virtually all of the 2000 landings I've done so far), and the tires, which are way overdue. I believe this will be my fifth set of tires, so apparently each pair is good for about 500 semi-botched landings... Mark Langford, Huntsville, AL mail: N56ML "at" hiwaay.net website: www.N56ML.com
