Help with ndb navigation

[ramtsi]

How do I intercept the 178 course to the ndb?

Thanks.

[BragRaindrop933]

Forgive me for my overly simplistic description, I’m not a pilot, but here’s what I do.

The heading dial on the ADF gauge needs to be rotated manually to your reflect your current course heading (it’s for indicative purposes only). When you set that you can see where the 178deg radial to the NDB beacon acually is so you can set a course & travel until you intercept it.
Now on the way you may need to change course heading to intercept it, so if you do you will have to change the ADF heading to that same course too to reflect that.

So in your example say I want to intercept the 178deg radial to that NDB I may have to manually set a aircraft course heading of 223deg (in example you list) and also set the ADF heading dial manually to be 223deg (the same). I then travel on that heading until the arrow on the ADF gauge points to 178deg, I can then change the course heading of the aircraft to 178deg to intercept that radial.

NDB’s force you do intercept this radial with manual adjustments to heading. VOR’s can be intercepted automatically. VOR/DME give distance/range info too.

[ramtsi]

Thanks. But the 310 has no way to rotate the ndb dial.

[BragRaindrop933]

I don’t have the 310, but try rotating the course indicator (yellow needle) on the main HSI unit & if the NDB course dial changes too it may be slaved to that unit. Not all aircraft have that linkage though many are manual.

[TCPD5091]

Here is a tutorial I made on tracking to and from an NDB on a specific course. This should help but navigating with an ADF takes a little bit of practice. NDB Navigation - Automatic Direction Finder (ADF) Tutorial - YouTube

[PacificSet90456]

When you are flying the heading of 223°, what direction (heading) is the NDB? We need to look at the ADF. NDBs don’t have radials like VORs. When flying to an NDB the nose of the aircraft should be pointed at the NDB with no wind. When flying the heading of 223° the bearing to the NDB is changing. We continue to fly 223° until the ADF bearing to the NDB is at 45° (223 -178 =45). Then turn to a heading of 178°. The bearing to the NDB will be 000° because we are flying directly towards if there is no wind. If there is a wind, a Wind Correction Angle has to be added to or subtracted from the 178° heading to keep the bearing to the NBD at 000°.

[Sling380]

The 310 has a very basic fixed compass card ADF indicator. This means that unless your current heading happens to be North then some mental maths is required to calculate the difference in the indicated and actual required heading. To simplify it, just ignore the compass rose and think of N as the nose of your aircraft and S as it’s tail, the needle then simply points to where the station is in relation to this nose to tail line through your aircraft. You simply steer towards the head of the needle to get it pointing directly up as normal.