The first time you read this, just skim thru it, then come back here and read it. When your airplane has finished loading in X-Plane, left-click with your mouse on the XPlaneNetworkData2 window to begin receiving data from X-Plane. Airspeed, heading, altitude, throttle setting, vertical velocity, vertical vector, and bank angle will show. On your computer keyboard: Press 1: Add and/or show a destination. Press 2: Offset from ILS course and ILS glideslope altitude at your location, OR offset from current route. Press 3: ILS horizontal/vertical bars. Press 4: Show/Don't show route. Press 5: Groundspeed in knots. Press 6: Feet Above Ground Level. Press 7: Angle of Attack. Press 8: Send DataRef. Press 9: Show 3 Trim settings. Press 0: Show gear, flaps, speedbrake, & hook settings. Press K to select Knots or Miles/Hour. Press T for bank to intercept a route or ILS. Press N for my autopilot to fly a route, ILS, or bank. Press . to pause/un-pause X-Plane. Autopilot: A, S, and H turn on/off altitude, speed, and heading hold. It's my autopilot (not X-Plane's). The following numbers must be typed in on your computer's Number Pad: Type in a heading number followed by D (e.g. 123 D (for degrees)). H will show. Type in an altitude number followed by F (e.g. 2500 F (for feet)). A will show. Type in a speed (in knots) followed by K (e.g. 150 K (for knots)). S will show. One or two engines only. Type in pitch degrees followed by P. The default is 5. Type roll degrees followed by R. The default is 30. My autopilot can handle more. You can enter a single decimal number for pitch or roll (e.g. 1.5). Press F1 for my autopilot to fly/not fly direct to the destination. Y turns yaw damping on/off. It also zeros roll trim and pitch trim when turned on. Press the 9 key to see Pitch, Roll, Yaw trim, plus the effect of yaw correction on plane's heading vs. plane's path. Roll trim could also affect the plane's course, but yaw trim is usually necessary for propeller-powered planes. You can pre-program D, F, and K. Type in a number and then press CTRL-D, CTRL-F, or CTRL-K. Then later you will only have to press D, F, and K for them to become active. If you want to make less than 10 degrees autopilot heading change, a default divisor of 30 can be decreased to a smaller number for fast planes, so try entering smaller numbers on the number pad and then pressing the J key. The F-4 Phantom needs a 1. The F4U Corsair needs a 3. You can change the speed over the ground. Enter a number on the number pad, and then press the SPACE BAR. I can fly between the Bay Area to Los Angeles REALLY fast at 80x ground speed, but I have to watch my altitude and be ready to press 1 and then the SPACEBAR to go back to normal speed. I use the area map that I loaded (see bottom of this help) to see where I am at that speed. ----------- To do much more, you'll have to create a new folder in Windows: C:\\Users\Public\X. That folder will hold any files you create for XPlaneNetworkData2. You can create sub-folders of that folder if you want to separate types of files. To create destination runways, after you've selected an airport and runway in X-Plane, and the plane's on the runway, press the 1 key to open either C:\\Users\Public\X or the sub-folder of your choice. Enter a new name (e.g. Destinations). DON'T do this when X-Plane is paused. This will convert the plane's data to runway data and put the new destination's data in that file to use again. Press the 1 key again to see the name of the airport, the distance to it, and a small circle on the big circle indicating its relative position (and with a line from it indicating the runway's direction). And, when you're on a final approach to that runway, press the 3 key to see ILS cross-bars. This uses my ILS function, and doesn't need a radio. BUT it's really a flight director for an ILS. It will take you to a 200 foot ceiling with a half a mile visibility for a landing. For a very accurate ILS, see the next paragraph. N turns on/off my autopilot if ILS is selected. It doesn't change trim, so be aware of this when turning it off. The ILS cross-bars need to be close to centered when turning my autopilot on. To fly a more accurate ILS, while you're on the runway you selected by pressing 1, go to Flight Configuration in X-Plane and put your plane on the opposite runway. This program will use the new data in combination with the first runway to use X-Plane's more accurate xyz 1-meter orientation to improve the plane's relative position and elevation on an ILS approach. With your plane on the opposite runway press SHIFT and the 1 key while in XPlaneNetworkData's window. XPlaneNetworkData2 will then add this second location of the plane to the destination file for that airport. NOW you can press 3 and then SHIFT (after releasing 3) to see the more accurate ILS cross-bars. ILS changes to xILS. N doesn't work here (but you could make a manual CAT II landing). To help with aircraft carrier landings, create and add an empty file (use Windows Notepad) - with the name CARRIER.dta - to your destinations folder. Then when you select it as the destination, ILS cross-bars will appear for the current aircraft carrier. The cross-bars should take you to the #2 wire. When you're on this glideslope, the touch-down location may not be right for the plane you're flying, so to change this from the default of 0 (when the plane isn't on the carrier deck) press Shift-number (0 thru 9), and then to make that number negative, press Z. Negative moves the plane down. If you press the N key, my autopilot will fly the plane to the #2 wire. If you press X, the carrier will appear a few miles ahead of you again -- after you choose CARRIER as destination. If you're flying a left downwind to the carrier, T will show you the bank needed for the turn to the inbound heading. The carrier location and heading will show on the full-screen map (see below). To stop showing destination location data, add another empty file with the name EMPTY.dta to your destinations location folder. Select this to stop showing that data. Press E to show/not show extended runway or next route line. ----------- A full-screen map along with the HUD circle can be displayed. Press M to show/not show it. But first you need to load an airport on the small screen (not EMPTY). Then when you go to full-screen, you'll see that airport, the plane, and any other airports, VORs, or fixes you previously created on that screen. You can add any number of runways, VORs, and fixes to the map and create departures/routes/arrivals. BUT FIRST you'll have to create a folder named C:\\Users\Public\X\DeparturesArrivals.txt to save the data. You can edit a saved data's file. Move lines, delete lines, and change numbers (carefully). If a fix has an associated altitude, that altitude will show in Angle2 (instead of a second angle, which otherwise is part of an arc definition). An arc's first angle is the most clockwise angle, and the nautical mile radius of the arc will be in Northing2. This program uses UTM easting, northing, and zone, as well as lat/lon to locate anything on the full-screen map. Press the Arrow keys to move the map. Press Page Up or Page Down to zoom in or out. Hold the Ctrl key down while pressing these for 10x change. Enter a number on the number pad and then press the Z key to zoom the map to that number. Press L to see/stop seeing latitude & longitude at the cursor as you move the mouse. To measure distance & bearing, hold the ctrl or shift key down, then press the left mouse button and move the mouse. Press 1 anywhere on the full-screen map to add another runway. Press the left mouse button to create a fix at the mouse location. OR: Press the right mouse button to place a fix or VOR that you put in C:\\Users\Public\X\fixVOR.txt. Read how: If VOR, using information from AirNav on the Internet, write the name of the VOR, followed by its lat/lon in that file. For example, SANF 37.6194853/-122.3738936 for the San Francisco VOR (first 4 letters capitalized). NOTE that the lat/lon is copied from the lat/lon in parentheses. If a fix, in AirNav it will look like this: 33-03-26.210N 117-08-16.360W Write the fix name in lower case letters, e.g. lakee 33-03-26.210N 117-08-16.360W (so lat/lon will be converted). VOR radials should be replaced by fixes, which are more accurate since magnetic variation changes over years, and VOR radial angles aren't changed very often, if at all. If you assigned a crossing altitude for a fix, when you move the mouse over it, the altitude will show. Delete a fix by moving the mouse pointer over it and pressing the Delete key. The data from this will be shown in the small XPlaneNetworkData window as route fixes to fly to/from. Route fixes will be shown in the order you created them (press the spacebar or backspace to change to another one). The current route fix you're flying to will show as a red dot. With a route showing, the assigned heading to the current route fix will show above your current magnetic heading. If you press T (N works here), the next route fix will be selected (same as pressing spacebar), AND will show the bank angle to maintain until you're within 50 feet of the route (or ILS course), at which time T is turned off. If N was pressed, H replaces N. Speed and the angle to turn affect the turning point. At the turning point T turns on. If H shows, N replaces H. The turn will be about 30 degrees of bank. H can capture and hold an arc fairly well, presuming you press H at the right time. Pressing the 3 key for an ILS approach also stops route data from the full-sized screen from being shown. If your plane is off the map, its destination bearing and distance will show at the top of the screen. You might have to move and/or zoom the map to make route lines and/or an arc show up properly. The map screen is oriented true north up, but all numbers and lines are magnetic heading. If you're creating a departure-route-arrival, make it for the arrival airport, and start the flight from the departure end. Change trim incrementally with the Arrow keys (nose up, down, roll left, right), but only if 9 was pressed (to show trim settings) and the small-screen HUD is selected. To show an overlay of a simple street map that you've created, press Enter in the full screen view. BUT FIRST, To create that simple area map with important roads (and city names you added) showing: Create a folder in C:/Users/Public/ and name it MapData. Download Osmconvert from "https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmconvert" and put it in that folder. Download Map from "http://jdmcox.com" and put it in that folder. Download o5m from "http://jdmcox.com" and put it in that folder. Then: 1.Download your desired map from "https://protomaps.com/downloads/osm" and put it in that folder, and change the long map name to a simpler one, with just .pbf as the extension. Up to 50 million "elements" can be downloaded from protomaps (e.g. San Francisco to Mammoth Mountain). 2.Run Map to convert that file to a .dta file (Map uses Osmconvert and o5m). XPlaneNetworkData will use that .dta file to show the area map when you press Enter to select downloaded/converted map data. To show city names on the area map, create a file in Notepad and enter city names, one per line, and name the file with the name of the area map and with X at the end of the name (".txt" as the file type). Put the file in the MapData folder. This file will be loaded with the area map file. If you've already run the Map program, you'll need to do it again to include the city info on the area map. Enter a number on the number pad for a new zoom and press Escape to center the area map at the cursor location. If you can't see the plane, press C to center the plane. Remove the area map from the screen by pressing V.