DCS World Tutorials - A-10C Warthog - CDU Basics and Creating Waypoints

what's up guys welcome back to DCs world and of course my continuing tutorial series for the 8nc warthog in this video we're going to begin the somewhat daunting task of taking a look at the CDU CDU or control display unit is our primary interface for this airplanes navigation system I'm not going to go over all of the functions of the CDU because that would take that would probably take in a week uh-huh so let's let's be let's be honest here we don't have that much time so what I'm going to do is I'm going to highlight some of the what I consider essential functions that you will use commonly with the CDU show you generally how to use them and just you know the best sort of a best practice for using the CDU for most for most of your missions you're and you're not going to need a lot of the advanced functions of the CDU in most cases they are there if you want to explore them there's a lot of reference material out there to learn the real ins and outs of the CDU but I'm going to teach you just the essentials so the CDU let's get my camera going here as I mentioned in the cockpit tour video you see if I can yeah good enough all right the CDU is this guy here we've got a screen with some data on it we've got a number keypad and we have a letters keyboard there is a couple of functions that we can do here first of all the CDU has what's called a scratch pad you see this cursor right here underneath my right near underneath my mouse blinking that's an input cursor if we start typing things on the keypad so like let's say lol I now put lol into that scratch pad now the scratch pad is basically just a line of text that hasn't been assigned anywhere yet so if we want to enter data into the CDU we first enter it into the scratch pad and then we use one of the side buttons here to apply it now we can't really do that on this page right here because we're on the alignment page when you first fire the airplane up and you first fire up the CDU it's going to default to this alignment page and this is the page you used to inspect and monitor the alignment of your airplanes navigation system the AI NS inertial navigation system we know it's a line because I mentioned before in the startup video that we see T equals four point zero space zero point eight that's the alignment four minutes to an accuracy of 0.8 okay that's how you know that it's aligned now if we want to do some of the different functions what I like to do is we can go to the nav page here we can get back to and again I'm using there's some buttons along here labeled sis nav Waypoint offset flight plan management previous and then there's a dimmer switch not really all that important we can go to our alignment page we have a time management page so we can adjust our desired times on target not something I use all that much unless you're building a mission around that you can set a actual date and here currently in this mission it's the year 2019 it's the month of March and it's the first day of March whatever not really all that important click Navigon DTS upload we could re we could reload the CDU if we needed to this oops ignore that that button there what I just clicked that triggered a master caution was it changed the it changed the navigation mode of the navigation system from blended - it can switch between a blend of the I NS and GPS it can go GPS only it can also go i NS only 99.9 percent of the time you're gonna leave this as blended attributes you're not necessarily going to touch too much options you're not necessarily going to touch too much you can change the displayed headings from magnetic to the MGR s grid and back it'll mostly be at magnetic you've also got a divert function so if you click on divert you're gonna get a list of airports here so we're currently sitting at Abu Dhabi International Airport on the Persian Gulf map so that's the closest airport to us but this list of airports will be the closest airports to your present position you can then use one of the side push buttons that lines up with them to select it and you'll get some field info for that Airport so this is Salim Akil Airport it's Airport identifier number 71 in our database those numbers are arbitrary don't worry about them field elevation is 10 feet you've got runways 1 6 and runway 3 4 they are five thousand eight hundred and five thousand three hundred and eighty seven feet excuse me long if it had an ILS frequency it would be listed here if it had a tacan frequency it would be listed here and you've got approach and tower frequencies here if there was a UHF frequency it would be listed here you've got a VHF frequency here so that's a quick way to get some information about an airfield that you might want to divert to okay and that's roughly all of the information you'll need from the nav setting now if we go to the waypoint menu we see WP menu we can select our steer point so this would be information regarding our current our first steer point we go back anchor point we can set an anchor point to where you know we might anchor we can also manipulate functions regarding bullseye now excuse me now in bullseye as I mentioned before when we briefly looked at the tad page bullseye is just a known reference point on a map in a given theatre usually set in the mission editor where the bullseye is for a particular mission or a particular campaign we have a function here for HUD on and HUD off currently it defaults to HUD off if I tick this it's then gonna give us bullseye information up on the HUD and I'll show you that in a little bit okay back to the waypoint menu we've got a waypoint button if we wanted to manipulate this current Waypoint we could change the coordinates of this Waypoint so you can see our northing and easting here so northing and easting come GPS coordinates we could change the elevation we could change its name it's currently its name as the airport we could copy this information to a new Waypoint using this button here we could change from lat/long to grid or UTM so you can see we now have grid information as well as lat/long coordinates if we want to cycle between them we can set desired time on target so if we need it to be at a target at a specific time we could set the time and then you will get some information on how fast or how slow we need to fly to get there a lot of times you won't use that unless your specific mission calls for it but it's not a function you're necessarily going to use all that much a function you will use quite often is manipulating and changing waypoints and I'll show you - how to do that in a second we're not actually gonna do it from this screen I'm gonna show you how to do it primarily what I like to do from the up-front controller or UFC actually so we'll look at that in just a minute we also have a from point function here this is if you wanted to set sort of like a starting point to go from a waypoint to another way point I don't use this much so honestly don't worry about it we can set offset information I don't really know or manipulate this really all that often it's not very useful to me flight plan management so this is where we would manually build a flight plan let's say we configured a whole bunch of waypoints manually in the airplane and we wanted to convert them into a flight plan now you see here flight plan MSN Auto FP build yada yada yada what this is is actually the automatically constructed flight plan that's made from the waypoints that are set in the mission editor so if this airplane was placed in the mission editor and the mission creator set a whole bunch of waypoints they would automatically get converted into a flight plan here I'm not going to show you how to convert existing waypoints or newly created waypoints into a flight plan because for the majority of your missions you're gonna have predetermined waypoints that you're gonna need these will all buddy be they'll already be programmed so you're not necessarily gonna need to use this but basically you just kind of give it the name the number and you add it to the flight plan from here system page some stuff to to some stuff to manipulate the egi the I NS the GPS etc you're not going to really touch this too much the last e function is I forget exactly what it stands for I'm gonna I'll put an annotation in the video because I'm gonna have to look for what lasty stands for but what it is is it is is wind correction data so if there's wind and there's a known wind speed in a known wind direction you can actually set this up in here and then it'll apply wind correction to things such as weapon drops or your autopilot or any such things let's now look back up front and we're going to look I'm gonna sort of angle this sort of like that because I want you to be able to see this MFD and I want you to be able to see this big keypad up here if you remember in the startup video I mentioned that the CDU it's screen can be mirrored on one of the MFDs so normally it would go up on the Left MFT here and you see I have CDU selected and we're looking at that same last e page that we were looking at before I'm just gonna go up to the UFC here and click function and then let's say steer point okay this is giving us info about our current steer point our current steer point as we selected a divert base before is set to sossel in the keel airbase okay so we're getting information on our current steer point it's saying our our distance here is 8.3 miles the elevation is 10 feet our bearing to that steer point is 275 degrees it's also displaying our current airspeed which is nothing right now so ignore that you know ground speed is zero whatever what I want to show off is how we can actually modify this to create a new Waypoint so you see here there's a shortcut Waypoint and we can use the side buttons of the MFD here to select this Waypoint function so if I click this we're now on the Waypoint page for that sauce on the keel Waypoint see the name here we see the same data as before we also see the coordinates north and east let's say we wanted to create a new Waypoint an entirely new way point we have this button here copy existing Waypoint data the tooltip disappeared copy existing Waypoint data into new mission point and enter a new name from scratch pad if we click this we now have a completely new blank Waypoint that has the same data as our previous Waypoint the default name is mission zero you can actually change this name using the keypad below with the letters or you can give it numbers if you want we can then change the elevation and we can change the coordinates so let's do that here so what I'm actually going to do is let's set a waypoint I'm gonna actually open up the F 10 map here you can see where we are we're sitting on the ground at Abu Dhabi International let's say I wanted to set a waypoint of L Mak to an airport over here and now the a 10k just from a functionality standpoint can look up this Airport but let's say I wanted to set a specific Waypoint at a spot on the ground just off the airfield here right to make it easy on myself I'm going to create a map mark boom I can name it new Waypoint now this has nothing to do with the actual adding of the Waypoint but it's going to help us out so if you look on the top we have our coordinates readout here the a10 works in both mg RS units so the grid UTM coordinates or it works in GPS northing and easting coordinates using a degree minute and then decimal minute format so if I press alt Y let's see there we go we're now if you look in the top left corner of the screen we now see degree minute decimal minute and that's roughly how the 8nc works so what we're going to do is we're gonna take these coordinates now so that first coordinate is 2 4 2 4 degrees 5 3 0.88 1 so let's press f1 to go back to our screen and I'm gonna enter this data using the UFC up here because you see we have this keypad let me just go back to you have 10 make sure I had it right so that's 2 4 5 3 8 8 1 so we'll go to 4 5 3 8 8 1 you can see that this information is now in our scratch pad now those numbers by themselves don't mean anything until we assign them somewhere so we're gonna click this button here which is going to assign that number to this field the northing field the latitude field of this Waypoint boom okay two four five three point eight eight one is now our North coordinate our latitude coordinate we now need to get our longitude so for that let's also go back to the F 10 map take a look at this coordinate here it looks like it's about five five zero eight zero nine six so let's go back now we need to give it a leading zero because longitude can go above 100 so we need to go zero five five let me just double check again zero five five zero eight zero nine six so zero five five zero eight zero nine six see the numbers here we're gonna click this button next to the longitude the easting boom we've now assigned that number to the longitude coordinate and now this Waypoint is right here we can also give it a elevation and we should because currently our system thinks this way point is underground because if you look the elevation up here where my mouse cursor is is 95 feet and oh actually I stand corrected the system is smart enough to know that the ground at that point in space is at 95 feet above sea level so it automatically set that it sometimes doesn't especially if an existing Waypoint that you're using is above the ground so just bear in mind that you may have to edit this value let's say we needed to edit it so again from the F 10 map we know that it's 95 feet we would type in 9 5 into the scratchpad and then click boom pretend for the heck of it I'm gonna change it so let's make it 500 okay it's 500 but we want that Waypoint on the ground 9 5 boom ok if we want it to enter these with using MGR s UTM coordinates there's a button over here to switch from lat/long to UTM so if we do that we now have our grid number our theater number our sub grid number and then the grid coordinates I could quite frankly do a whole video on just using UTM but this is something your your best to research on yourself it's kind of outside the scope of using the CDU outside of basic functions you'd be you would do just as well to stick to lat and long and you'll get by just fine now how do we actually select that Waypoint let me unpause the camera look forward here I have to make sure my HUD is SOI easy way is to go down here and select mission and I'm using my data management switch to scroll through okay so normally you would see here Waypoint zero is in it posit or initial position if we do DMS up it selects Waypoint one and if we look over at our CDU we're still viewing the Waypoint page for mission zero zero one here but now we have Espie Espie indicates that this is our current steer point okay lot to wrap your head around because the CDU is a very complex instrument it's it is essentially a fully fledged flight computer and can plan out a flight from beginning to end with lots of different data points data functions this is very basic what I've shown you here but it's really all you need to get going I may do a video in the future with some more advanced functions of the CDU but it may or may not be needed but we'll see let me know in the comments if you want to see that but that I'll be mostly up to you guys but for now hope that helps and I'll see you guys for the next video take care

Channel: ravagetalon

Views: 2,297

Rating: 4.9365077 out of 5

Keywords: DCS World, A-10C, Tutorial, CDU, Waypoints

Id: MduLMTfZkYA

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2019