Night Owl 6/Night Owl's Shareware - PDSI-006 - Night Owl Corp (1990).iso/007a/ascat.zip/TP2GUIDE.DOC

Text File | 1990-12-18 | 15KB | 392 lines

                      TRIP PLAN II USER'S GUIDE



To run the Trip Plan II program type TP2 and press <Enter>.

Trip Plan II is a time & distance calculator designed primarily to aid in
the scheduling of private and corporate aircraft.

Because it can estimate road miles as well as air  miles,  it can  be  very
helpful in planning vacation and other road trips.

It comes with a  data base  containing  the geographical location of 4,000+
airports in the continental United States.

The only limit on the number of airports you can  have in  the data base is
the storage capacity of your computer. You may add additional  locations to
to the system,  however you will  need some way of knowing the latitude and
longitude before you can enter them.

There  are  a  number  of  publications  available   that  will  have  this
information, and they usually can be found at your local airport.


THE MAIN MENU


After  the program  has been  successfully  loaded the  following main menu
should be on your screen.





             TRIP PLAN II - TIME & DISTANCE PROGRAM Ver 2.2
          Copyright 1990 by Matrix Software Co. All Rights Reserved
PROGRAM SETTINGS                                 Airports on File 4,004
Mileage calculations are based on Air Miles.
Speed and distance are Nautical Miles.
Speed is set to 205 Kts.
 Layover  time   =  10 minutes.
 Wind Direction  =  230
 Wind  Speed     =   25 Kts
Cost  per  Mile  =  0.09


                       MAIN MENU                         CURRENT ITINERARY
                                                         Lawrence Municipal
        (1) - Enter Trip Itinerary
        (2) - Add/Edit Locations
        (3) - Print List of City/Airports
        (4) - Change Program Settings
        (5) - Remove Current Itinerary
        (6) - Save Current Itinerary to Disk
         Press <Esc> to Exit program

         Enter selection >


You may select any of the menu items by number or by the first letter of the
selection.

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You do not need to press enter after selecting  a menu item.  In fact while
you are using TP2, you will discover that the only  time you  need to press
the enter key is when your entry does not fill the entire field.

The first item on the menu is  of course  the main function of the program.
In order for TP2 to calculate distance and various other items of interest,
you have to tell it where you want to go.

When you select item 1 the trip itinerary screen will be displayed and the
current itinerary (if there is one) will be calculated and displayed.  The
cursor should be at the next location for entering a city/airport name.

TP2 is a disk based data management system. Most of the data needed to make
calculations and display important information is stored in disk data files
and TP2 needs to find that data in order to do it's job.

Since it is a disk based system, the speed with which TP2 can find cities and
make calculations depends a lot on the computer you are using. Probably the
most  noticeable  effect on speed is a hard drive.  TP2 works  several  times
faster on systems with hard drives than it does on a floppy drive system.

To help TP2 locate cities faster, we have kept them in alphabetical order in
their files. This gives the program the advantage of knowing  where to look
for locations, rather than searching through the entire 4,000+ records.

This also allows you to find your desired cities without having to enter the
complete city/airport name.

For example, suppose you are looking for Houston Texas. You could type "hou"
and press <Enter> TP2 will find and display  Houghton Lake MI.

The program tries to  match  whatever  information  you give it to the first
alphabetical occurrence in the file.

If there is no match, TP2 will get as close as it can and display that city.

When the city is displayed, it should appear brighter on your screen  and a
message at the bottom of  your  screen  will  advise  you to press enter to
select the displayed city, or to use the up or down arrows to scroll.

In this example, you could press the down arrow 4 time to scroll to the first
airport in houston which would be Houston Andrau.

Now lets try another method. With a city displayed and the message line at the
bottom of the screen telling you you can press the <Esc> key to Re-Enter the
city, press <Esc> to clear the field.

Type "houst" and press enter. Houston Andrau, Tx should be the first match to
your request and should be displayed bright on your screen.

Suppose you really wanted to go to Houston Hobby airport. Enter "houston h"
and, bingo, Houston Hobby, Tx is displayed for you.

Where there are more than one city and airport with the same name in the data
base (example Lawrence Muni, Ks  and Lawrence Muni, Ma) then TP2 will use the
state for alphabetizing. In this case, Lawrence Ks would be found first.

Even though the state is used to sort the data files, you CAN NOT use it to
find locations. TP2 uses only the city/airport names in it's search. If you
include the state it will be treated as part of the city/airport name and
will not help you find the desired location.

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Where you have two locations with the same city and airport name,  you can
force TP2 to sort one ahead of the other by changing the name of one of them.

For example, if you want Lawrence Muni, Ma to be found before Lawrence Ks
then select item 2 at the main menu and edit Lawrence, Ma so that it reads,
Lawrence  Muni, Ma.

Note that there are 2 spaces between the word Lawrence and Muni. The space
has a lower ASCII value than letters that might be used in an airport name
and will cause Lawrence  Muni, Ma to be placed ahead of Lawrence Muni, Ks in
the file.

When using menu item 2, make sure you have a few minutes to spare. Any time
you add a new location to the system or edit the name of an existing one, it
will automatically be sorted to the proper location in the file.

This could take a few minutes depending on how much sorting and swapping has
to go on. The sorting is usually done in less than 2 min. on most computers.

Once you have your desired itinerary displayed, study the information to the
right of each city name.

The first column under RWY is the longest runway available at that airport.
The value has been rounded to the nearest 100' and then divided by 100. Add
two zero's when you read the number. For example the number 118 actually
represents a runway length of 11,800'.

Most of the airports in the data base have hard surface runways, there are
a few with other than hard surface and we have tried to indicate those by
putting an * in the last position of the City/Airport name field.

The next column (MDA) tells you if there is a published instrument approach
for the airport. If not, than it is a VFR airport and will have VFR in that
column.

If there is an instrument approach  then  the  type of the  first  published
approach will be indicated by one of 10 letters. The one letter codes are as
follows:

V = VOR
N = NDB
L = Localizer
B = Localizer Back Course
D = VOR/DME
I = ILS
S = SDF
P = PAR or ASR
A = LDA
E = NDB/DME

Following the code will be a 2 or 3 digit  number  indicating the lowest
published decent allowed on the approach.

This number is always rounded UP to the nearest 10' and then divided by 10.
Add one zero to read the value. An ILS approach with a decision height of 246'
would be coded  I25.  A VOR/DME approach with an MDA of 1212' would be coded
D122.

The next column is distance and is not coded. If you are using air miles for
your calculations, you will find this figure to be quite accurate.



                               Page (3)

If you are calculating road  miles,  then there  will  be some  error in the
calculated distance. This is because TP2 simply applies a formula to straight
line distances to give you the approximate distance by road.

The amount of error varies according to the type of terrain the itinerary is
over. Distances will usually be under estimated in mountainous terrain and
over estimated in the flat lands.

Next is the Avg Hdg. This is the approximate magnetic heading required to fly
between selected cities. The effect of the wind and magnetic variation have
been taken into consideration and  as  a  rule,  this  information  is fairly
accurate, however,  this program  is not intended for, nor is it approved as
a means of obtaining navigation information.

You should use Trip Plan II for estimating and planning purposes only!

NOT TO BE USED FOR NAVIGATION OR DETERMINING FUEL REQUIREMENTS

After Hdg is the Ground Speed. Again the effect of the wind is considered in
the calculation.

Now that we know the distance and the speed, the ETE (Estimated Time Enroute)
is calculated and displayed. When Air Miles are used TP2 adds about 4 and 1/2
minutes to the ETE to allow for climb out and decent at airports.

Finally the cost of the trip is calculated based on the distance and whatever
you have set the cost/mile figure to.

By the way, if you are using TP2 for quoting charter's, verify the distance
and cost by some other means before you confirm things with your customer.
WE CAN NOT AND WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR BUSINESS LOSS OR DAMAGES caused by
or related to, the use of this program.

With all of this information now displayed and the totals for distance, ETE,
and cost at the bottom of the screen, press <Enter> with a blank city name
and the cursor jumps to the upper right of the screen under "Depart".

Enter your first expected departure time. Don't use 24 hr time. Use "A" or "P"
for AM or PM and you don't need to use the colon.

For example, if you expect to depart at 9:30 AM, type 930a and press <Enter>.

TP2 calculates all of your arrival and departure times for the entire trip.
Whatever layover time you have set the program for will be used calculating
each departure time.

You can move to any departure with the Up or Down arrows and change the times
if you would like. When you do, times below it will be re-calculated for you.

You should note that all times represent local times. Trips that involve more
than one time zone have the Arrival  and  Departure  times corrected to local
times automatically.

Use the Print Screen feature of your computer to get a hard copy of the trip
calculations if you would like.

NOTE: Some printers are not capable of printing solid horizontal and vertical
lines. If your print out is cluttered by  D's,  M's,  3's  or other characters
where lines should be, you can toggle the screen lines from solid to broken
by pressing the F10 key while in the enter city name field.

Now press <Esc> to get back to the main menu and we will talk about some of
the other features of TP2.

                                 Page (4)


At the top of your screen under PROGRAM SETTINGS is where you will find the
current settings that TP2 uses in making time & distance calculations.

The first line is where you select <A> for air miles or <R> for road miles.

If you select "Air Miles" then the next line is automatically set to Nautical
miles. Selecting "Road Miles" will set it to Statute miles.

You may override these settings if you wish.

The next line is for setting the speed. You should use the average speed you
expect to make good regardless if you are computing air or road miles.

If you are in an air mile mode, the next line will be for Layover time. This
is the number of minutes (0 to 59) that the program will use when calculating
departure times in your itinerary.

The next 2 lines are for wind direction & speed and the last line is where you
enter the cost per mile.

For road mile calculations, you would enter your average miles/gallon and cost
per gallon. The cost per mile is then calculated for you.

The Airports on File message at the upper right of your screen tells you how
many locations are currently on file.

You can add as many locations to the file as your computer system has room for
but you should keep in mind that records CAN NOT be deleted from the file.

To conserve space and keep TP2 as fast as when you first started using it, we
recommend that if you need to add locations to the file, consider editing one
of the existing records instead.

Out of 4,000+ locations, there should be one or two that you will never need
to go to!

Just to the right of the MAIN MENU is the "CURRENT ITINERARY".

If you were to Press "E" for Enter Trip Itinerary now, whatever city's listed
under CURRENT ITINERARY would be calculated and displayed and the cursor would
be in the next City Name entry field.

You can remove the current itinerary at the main menu by pressing "R".

This will only remove it from memory and not the disk file that keeps track of
the itinerary between program runs for you.

It you want to remove it from the disk file press "R" then "S" to save a blank
itinerary.

Most charter operators like to keep there home base as the current itinerary
so it is ready to use for charter quotes.

Menu item # 3 will allow you to print all or part of the data base TP2 uses.

You can select any one state by entering the 2 letter abbreviation. The city's
will be printed in alphabetical order and will contain all of the pertinent
information such as Latitude, Longitude, Runway length etc.

At the bottom of your screen is the date of the last data base revision and
the date of the next scheduled revision.

                                 Page (5)




Data base revisions are available to all registered owners of Trip Plan II
for $15.

The revision will include the latest copy of the program along with the latest
changes and corrections to the data base.

You can reduce the $15 charge to $0 by helping us make corrections to the data
base.

If you have discovered any errors such as spelling, longest runway, MDA, or
Lat/Lon while using TP2, let us know about it at least 30 prior to the next
revision date and we will allow you $5 credit for each error (maximum $15)
that you tell us about.

Please include your Name, Address, and program registration # when ordering
the revision. If you are submitting corrections to the data base for credit,
you must include the name of your reference material (Jep charts, airman's
information manual sectional chart etc.) along with the correction.

There is a $3 shipping and handling charge for a total of $18.

Send orders for revisions to:

Matrix Software Marketing Co.
3308 West 22nd Street
Lawrence, Ks  66047


































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