Possible HSI Source Bug

[mmarien]

I just received my Skyview back from repairs. The settings were intact. On the first flight I had no HSI SRC's. I only have two. A GPS495 and the Dynon GPS. The only options in AP were HDG and TRK. The NAV was greyed out. No sources were showed on the PFD and I couldn't change the HSI SRC from the AP menu. The HSI SRC didn't show up on the PFD menu. The moving map was working and the magenta line from a DTO showed up on the map.

At my first stop I spent some time reviewing the menu's looking for a way to turn on the NAV sources and even checked my serial settings. Both the GPS495 and SKYVIEW were configured in the serial settings. On the way back (taxing), I switched off the G meter. It had been on since I reinstalled Skyview. Sometime after that I noticed I had my navigation sources were back. Both on the PFD and I could select NAV from the AP->ROLL menu. I switched the G meter back on but AP->ROLL->NAV remained available. Other than switching the G meter off, I don't believe I changed anything. I just went through all the menus looking for a solution. 

I didn't try to duplicate the problem other than switching the G meter back on. Is this a feature or a bug?

 

[Dynon]

Well one thing - you'll only be able to select NAV mode if the currently active HSI source has an active CDI (IE, either a flight plan or direct-to on the device is currently active). So perhaps it was just that?

Beyond that possibility, having the g-meter up shouldn't inhibit your ability to fly a NAV source if there's active navigation from that source.

 

[mmarien]

As mentioned in my message, I did have a DTO selected using Skyview as the source. The magenta line was on the MAP and DTW and ETE NEXT were functioning. I found a screen shot from dec.03.2016 that shows this. Different time but same anomaly.

It's not consistent. Here is a screen shot with the G Meter and NAV selected. For sure switching to the G Meter makes the HSI sources disappear from the PFD screen. That also may have an affect on the menu's.

 

[dynonsupport]

Just because you see the DTO on the map doesn't mean the HSI is on a source. When the G-Meter is up, you can't see or tell what your HSI source is. So it's really not possible to know or tell what the config is with the G-Meter up.

The only bug would be if you turned off the G-Meter and the HSI was there with a magenta line shown and active, but the AP wouldn't fly it when the G-meter was up.

 

[mmarien]

Makes sense. I did a short flight today to explore it further. Here is the behavior I saw.

If I select the G meter from the PFD the HSI SRC disappears from the PFD menu. I believe that is normal behavior. HSI SRC is still available from the AP menu but I don't know if it does anything as there is no display of the HSI sources on the PFD to tell. Perhaps the AP->HSI SRC button should also disappear when the G meter is displayed. The NAV is greyed (unless it was active before switching on the G meter).

Switching the G Meter off brings back the HSI SRC on the PFD and PFD menu. But there is no HSI source displayed on the PFD so the NAV button is still greyed out. This is what confused me the first time it happened. The manual talks about switching between HSI sources but doesn't say if no source is an option.

Selecting HSI SRC from either menu brings back a HSI source and the NAV button becomes available. So the only problem is that the HSI source goes to none if the G meter is toggled. If the AP is active with a NAV source, toggling the G meter doesn't seem to affect the AP. I don't know if the active HSI source is still displayed after toggling the G meter when the AP is active. I couldn't find a screen shot of that scenario.

Probably not a bug but confusing to lose the HSI source by toggling the G meter when the AP is not active.

 

[Dynon]

So not having a source selected IS an option. And, when you have the g-meter shown, the HSI source indication is suppressed, so is the selector (at least from that menu). But it doesn't appear that selecting the g-meter actually toggles or turns off the source that is selected. In other words, if you have an HSI showing SkyView guidance, then turn on g-meter, then turn off g-meter, you should still be SkyView guidance on the HSI. If there wasn't previously an HSI source selected, then it would go back to that too. Are you seeing different behavior? The key thing here is - what is on your HSI before you turn on the g-meter?

 

[mmarien]

I agree. I was on a five day xcountry so had time to figure it out. It all works as you say. The only thing confusing was the HSI SRC button is still available on the AP menu when the g-meter is selected. Pressing it changes the source but the current source isn't displayed so I couldn't see what it was changed to.

Toggling that menu item off while the g-meter is displayed would save a lot of confusion for us guys that can't keep our fingers off the buttons.  :-[

 

[dynonsupport]

Serious question: If we greyed out the NAV SRC in the AP menu, wouldn't you have written us asking why it was unavailable?

 

[mmarien]

Maybe or maybe not. It wasn't intuitive to me that the NAV sources disappeared because the g-meter was displayed. My bad. The fact that the AP->NAV SRC button didn't seem to be doing anything added to the confusion. If it was greyed I would have suspected that it would come back once I had the NAV sources back on the PFD screen.

 

[Schorsch]

When displaying the G-Meter, the bug on my Touch Display is that you'd expect the Touch area for the HSI-source to become inactive when the HSI-source infobox is hidden. But it actually switches the (invisible) source and has confused me a few times when turbulence causes fat fingers... and the auto-pilot just turning off when loosing NAV-mode.

Could there be an option to remove the "blank" HSI-source?

 

[Dynon]

Interesting. We'll look into changing that behavior, but we may opt to keep the info widget up all the time, even when the G-meter is up. It's still good info to know what you're tracking on the HSI - especially when you're on AP - even if the CDI/GS are suppressed temporarily while you're pulling G.

 

[Roger_Hirschbein]

OK-We did a recent flight and found that the DTW worked fine as long as we kept the Dynon as the SOURCE of information. When we changed the SOURCE to the Garmin 650, the MAP display showed dashed lines in the DTW box. No real problem as the Garmin showed the distance. Just seems strange that the information isn't being transferred.

 

[Dynon]

Can you show us a screenshot of what you're seeing, with both the pfd and map pages showing?