aburkefl
First Officer
Flight distance : 78612 ft
United States
Offline
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There are two schools of thought on compass calibration.
School 1 - calibrate your compass before every flight.
School 2 - calibrate your compass. Once it's calibrated, don't mess with it - with a couple of exceptions.
School 2 adherents feel that if it's been calibrated successfully that calibration will last for a long time. If you keep calibrating the compass, eventually you're going to get some bad data or a not-so-good calibration and therefore be begging for trouble. These are your basic (I'm not judging them!) "...if it ain't broke, don't fix it..." category of users/owners.
Now the exceptions.
If you're flying pretty much in the same area all the time, there is likely no need for constant calibration in the first place. I also live in Florida. I think, basically throughout the peninsular part of the state (excluding the panhandle), the compass deviation is approximately 5 degrees. That means there's a 5-degree difference between true north and magnetic north. Not super-significant.
Now if you go up into the panhandle (i.e., much further west), you might run into areas where the deviation will be different than it is, say in or near Orlando.
If you travel a good distance (hundreds or even thousands of miles) away from where you've been flying, a new compass calibration is probably a must.
It's also not a bad idea to do a new compass calibration (and an IMU calibration) right after effecting a firmware update/upgrade.
Does that help?
Art - N4PJ
Leesburg, FL
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