This help file is a high level user guide on how to use the basic functions of the nDAC (Navigraph Digital Aeronautical Charts) client software. It is organized as a "drill down" on Interfaces and Concepts.
The legend on how to read the charts and interpret the symbology is found in a separate file: navigraph_airportchart_legend.pdf.
nDAC is a software that acts both as a viewer and a file transfer software. It is a client that connects to a server and downloads files that are later displayed. It can be any type of files, but currently only chart files, video files, text files and software patches are downloaded
The following section explains some of the fundamental concepts in the nDAC software.
An account is used to identify a user. The identification is done by a combination of user name and password. The same user name and password is used both to register the nDAC software and to log in to any service on the Navigraph website.
The user name and password are stored in the nDAC software so that it can identify you on future sessions. This means that the nDAC is connected to you and is therefore personal.
You can change your password on the Navigraph website. However, you do not need to change the password in your nDAC software. Once registered it keeps track of you through other means.
The take home from this section of the help file is that whenever you identify yourself with a user name and a password all future actions are related to you personally via your Navigraph account. Do not share your user name or password with anyone as your account is personal.
You may charge credits to your personal account. Credits cost money and it is partly for this reason you should be the only one able to access your account. Since we are dealing with real world monetary units here,you probably want to keep a close eye on them too. This is why you need to provide us with a working email address so that you can receive account statements and information relating to credit handling.
Since you exchange your money for credits, the credits can be seen as small payment tokens. They are small because most of the data Navigraph offers is so cheap that it does not make sense to charge a credit card for all these small transactions, but never the less we need to charge a little something. For this reason you charge your account with a small amount of credits, which is the equivalent of a small amount of money, so that you can freely use it when you like, for all those small transactions.
Navigraph credits can be used for all types of data that is downloaded from any Navigraph service. This includes Airport Charts, Enroute Charts, Videos, Tutorials via the nDAC software, but also FMS Data from the Navigraph Website.
Larger items from the Navigraph Online Store can however not be purchased with credits, but that is OK since in this case the general idea with credits, to help with smaller transactions, is lost anyhow.
redits are valid for 270 days from their time of purchase. Each batch has its own "life time" which means that 100 credits bought today will expire 270 days from now. A separate 100 credits bought tomorrow will not expire until one day later – provided that you have not spent them of course, which is of course the ideal scenario. Don't buy more credits that you can spend. (Sometimes there might be a bulk discount offer, but this requires your to do some careful thinking and realize how many you actually need. It is not always necessarily good value for all users.)
Initially we give you 6 credits to try out the nDAC software. This will make it possible to download three airports for instance. However, you may only use the nDAC software for 10 days. After that it will shut down until you charge your account with credits.
As soon as we can verify that you have charged your account with credits the nDAC software will exit demo mode and you are free to use it for as long as you like. The downloaded data is also indefinitely yours to keep, regardless if the credits expire 270 days later or if you have a 0 balance on your account.
The nDAC relies heavily on the fact that you are connected to the Internet since all of its data is downloaded from servers. For this reason you must make sure that there is no firewall blocking access to the Internet and that any router allows communication over port 80. This is the standard port so if you can reach www.navigraph.com via a browser (or read this text for that matter as it is retrieved from the server as well) the router is not your problem.
If you know that you have a proxy server, you may need to make some additional alterations in the nDAC settings interface accessible from the top menu.
An index file is a local copy of the server database. What does this mean? Well, index files are used by the nDAC software to see which files it may ask for and how large they are. If the nDAC software asks you to download a new index file you are strongly advised to do so, since that will let nDAC know if there has been any changes and if new and updated files are available for download.
There are index files for all types of data: Airport Charts, Enroute Charts, Videos, and Other Downloads.
If the nDAC says that new index files are available, this means that there has been an update. Woho! Happy days! New data available! Go get it!
If you for some reason need to update one or several of your index files manually, they are available in the Download Manger tab, in the Other Downloads tab. They are free to download is you want to make sure you are using the latest one. The actual download works just like any other download, which is covered in the section on the Download Manger below in this help file
All data is downloaded to your local machine. This is good because that means that you do not need to wait for data to arrive every time you want to look at it. Furthermore you may work with the data even if you are not connected to the Internet.
Because of the fact that the data is stored locally you are also exposing yourself to the risk of loosing everything you ever paid and downloaded. For this reason we strongly recommend that you backup your data.
The nDAC software will ask you once a week if you want to perform a backup. Please do so and store the backup file on a separate physical storage device. Why? Well, imagine you experience a hard disk crash. What good is it if your backup sits on the aforementioned wrecked disk? Everyone knows how to do it, it is just that neglect and laziness prevents us from taking the proper precautions. Now you know how to do it so it is up to you.
To perform a backup is the exact same thing as performing an export. If you plan to uninstall nDAC (to change computer or reinstall your operating system) you obviously need to export all your data if you are going to be able to move it to your fresh installation. In the fresh installation you would then perform an... anyone? ... Yes, correct, import is the word we are looking for here.
So, the take home from this section of the help file is: Listen to nDAC and perform your weekly backups by exporting the data. Use the import function to restore your backup or to import data after a fresh installation of the nDAC software.
The will probably be one ore several poor souls messing this up, regardless of how many times we write and explain how to perform backups. There is a slightly more intricate behind the scenes system were previous databases are backed up in temporary files. This is all but user friendly but we do mention some of it in our FAQ on the Navigraph website. If you find yourself knee-deep, don't give up hope. Write us and we will see what can be done. We don't promise anything, all we are saying is that there might be hope even in a situation where there seems to be no apparent backup.
In this section of the help file the interfaces are explained. The interfaces are not explained in great detail because most of them are intuitive (and if you really insist on that we explain the workings of a printer button, it is not a help file you need... it is something else).
The main interface can be said to contain four "main tabs". They each cover one large area of the nDAC software: Airport Charts, Enroute Charts, Learning Center, and Download Manager. We will now present each of them in order.
The first time you start nDAC the Airports tab in the Airport Chart tab is empty. You will need to download an airport to see something here. You may either go to the Download Manager tab to search and download an airport, or click the button Include Airport Index
Suppose you clicked Include Airport Index. This would show you all the airports available based on your index file (which is your local database as explained earlier). The airports in grey are airports you have not downloaded yet. The black ones you already have.
If you select a grey airport a download button will appear (you may also right click on the airport). Push the download button to download the airport. It will take a few seconds while the download is performed in the Download Manager tab (you may flip over to see it if you like). After some time has elapsed nDAC will ask you if you would like to install the airport. Once installed, the airport will now have turned black instead of gray. Clicking the button Exclude Airport Index will now hide all airports you have not downloaded yet, but the one you did download will still be visible.
The downloaded airport will be visible under a globe icon. You may have to click the globe once to display the airports beneath it. The list of airports is namely sorted according to country. The button Expand All/Collapse All will show/hide all airports if you need a quick country overview.
Now select your downloaded airport in the Airports tab by clicking it once. The Charts list in the lower left corner should now fill with the charts available at that airport. Click one of the files in the Charts list and it should appear in the Chart Viewer, which is the main view port in the center of the interface
At the top of the Charts list there is a blue icon that says ADI (Aerodrome Directory Information). If you click this file, some text with general information on the airport will be displayed. (If you are more comfortable with the imperial unit system, go to File:Settings:General in the main menu to change to feet and miles.)
On top of the Charts list there is a text field. When you start typing into it the list of charts will be filtered discriminated on the characters that you enter. This is convenient when you need, say, only all ILS chart
The Print All button will (surprisingly enough) print all of the charts visible in the Charts list. The reason why it is mention here is because, in combination with the Filter function, you can decide which charts to print if you do not want all of them, but a fair share of them.
In the printer dialog that follows you may apply some of the settings your printer may offer. These settings are then duplicated for all subsequent printing procedures so be sure the settings are the intended ones for all the selected charts. Some charts vary in format you know.
nDAC is not (yet) a flight planning tool. The Routes button will only bring up an interface where you can selected departure and destination airports. By doing so you will have them readily available under the Routes tab. You may also specify as many alternates as you like.
In the Routes interface you may also import PLN files from your flight simulator software. Provided that you have the airports specified in the PLN file, the airports will be added to the route.
Bookmarks serve a similar function as Routes - namely to create easy access to those often used charts. The bookmarking function works like most browsers do (organizing folders and so on...) so there is no need for further explanation here.
The Find function can help you find airports and charts.
The Chart Viewer is the centrally located view port in which the charts and ADI is displayed. Nothing really advanced going on here. There are scroll bars that you can use to move the chart around, but you may also use tools from the Toolbar to zoom and pan.
The toolbar has history arrows so that you can flip back and forth through recently displayed charts. Rotation, pan, and zoom are pretty obvious. There are some fit to page functions as well. Next to follow is a manual print function (not the Print All described earlier).
The button with a globe with a file on it serves the function of bringing back focus on the currently displayed file in the Airports list and Charts list to the left. If you have used the history, route or bookmarking functions to navigate there is not always a guarantee that the selected file is the one displayed. You may want to sneak a peak in the Statusbar at the bottom of the window to see what is displayed (if you can't tell just by looking at the chart of course).
The last icon will bring up a comments interface. Here you may add personal comments your charts individually. Comments are not shared or visible to anyone but you. If the chart has a comment, this icon will be green, otherwise yellow.
Similarly to Airport Charts the Charts list is empty the first time you start nDAC. Also here you may opt to Include Enroute Chart Index to see which ones that are available for download. Similarly to the procedure in Airport Charts you may select the gray ones for download and installation.
Similarly to Airport Charts the Chart list of Enroute Charts sort by country name. To display a chart you need first to download one. Then a single click on the chart will make it appear in the Chart Viewer in the middle of the interface.
Which Enroute Charts do you want? Well, for this you need to have a look at the two index charts located at the top of the Charts list. They contain information on where in the world the different charts have coverage.
Don't confuse index charts with index files. They are two different things. Index charts are picture files displaying coverage. Index files are text files containing information about database contents.
The Chart Viewer is located in the middle of the page. It will display an Enroute Charts when it is selected from the Charts list.
Please note that the Enroute Charts are very large and may take a while to load and draw on slower computers.
The toolbar has history arrows so that you can flip back and forth through recently displayed charts. Rotation, pan, and zoom are pretty obvious. There are some fit to page functions as well. Next to follow is a manual print function.
At this point it might be in order to say that Enroute Charts do not print really well because of their large physical size. A real Enroute Chart is like a table cloth in size and printing it on an A4 will make it too small. Some printers support tiled printing and this may be an option if you really want to have it on paper. For those of you that do not have printers that support tile printing, there is software that can do this.
The button with a globe with a file on it serves the function of bringing back focus on the currently displayed file in the Airports list and Charts list to the left. If you have used the history, route or bookmarking functions to navigate there is not always a guarantee that the selected file is the one displayed. You may want to sneak a peak in the Statusbar at the bottom of the window to see what is displayed (if you can't tell just by looking at the chart of course).
The last icon will bring up a comments interface. Here you may add personal comments your charts individually. Comments are not shared or visible to anyone but you. If the chart has a comment, this icon will be green, otherwise yellow.
The Chart Overview is located in the lower left corner. The red area indicates which portion of the charts that is currently visible in the Chart Viewer. You may also navigate the Chart Viewer by clicking, holding and dragging the red area in the Chart Overview.
The Learning Center is the third tab. This tab contains tutorials, either in written form or as videos. To see the written tutorials, go to the Online Content tab. To watch a video, go to the Video Training tab.
Just like any other material in the nDAC software videos are downloaded to your local computer. This means that this interface is empty until you have either used the Download Manager to download a video, or clicked the Include Video Index to see the available videos and downloaded by clicking on the download button that appears one a video is selected (alternatively right mouse click).
The video list shows which videos you have already downloaded. This list is empty when nDAC is launched the first time. You may click the "Include Video Index" so see which videos that are available for download. The videos are categorized according to main subjects (the yellow folders) that you can expand and collapse by clicking on them with the mouse.
Clicking on any video file will display its Title, Author, Original DVD Title, and Description in the lower left corner. In some instances the original DVD is available for purchase, in which cases there will be a link in the lower left corner that will lead to the Navigraph Online Store. (The purchase is not final until the order contents have been reviewed and separate credit card or Paypal payment has been made.)
Clicking on a downloaded video file, the video will load it into the Video Viewer. To start the video, please press the Play button in the Controls in the bottom part of the Video Viewer. Please note that the videos are compressed and it will take a short while before they appear in the Video Viewer. This waiting time is dependent on your computer's performance. Please be patient.
The Video Viewer displays the video one the video file has been selected in the Video List. The Video Viewer uses the standard codec which is installed my your operating system to see WMV files. Thus you do not need to install any additional components.
For all settings, please refer to the graphics setting on the local machine. There are no additional video parameters in the nDAC software.
The controls will start playing and stop a video. You may use the time slider to fast forward through a video. There is also a volume slider. Note that the volume slider works independently from your system volume settings. If you do not hear anything it might be because your main volume setting is set too low. Another control buttonwill bring up the viewer in fullscreen mode. To exit fullscreen mode, press the Esc button.
The Download Manager is the fourth tab. Each tab contains a set of interfaces that look almost the same. This is because they all work almost the same.
The My Account interface is located to the right in the Download Manager. It identifies who is the registered user of the current nDAC installation. If the nDAC is in online mode it also shows the number of remaining credits and gathered points.
Points are basically the numbers of credits that you have spent. It is the basis of the user loyalty program (to be announced).
Indicies is English for indexes. By this we mean the four tabs (Airport Index, Enroute Chart Index, Video Index, and Other Downloads) in the Download Manger tab. As explained in the beginning of this help file Airport Charts, Enroute Charts and Videos have index files. Index files are lists of what is available in the server. This means that you may browse the index, select an item, and click the Download Selected Items button and the client will ask the server for this particular item.
All four tabs work in similar ways: There is a list of items. You select one (or several by holding down Ctrl). Click Download Selected Items. And it places itself (or themselves) in the Queue.
In the Airport Index tab you have the option of filtering your list of airports. Type the name of the aiport, the ICAO code or the IATA code and press the Filter button and the list beneath will show the results. The Show Options button will reveal more filter options such as proximity search for instance. (A nifty little tool when you are searching for alternates.)
The Queue is one of the tabs at the bottom of the page on each of the sub tabs of the Download Manger tab. Ok, once again: In the Download Manager tab there are four tabs that represent index files. The index files present items that can be downloaded. Downloaded items need to be queued. For this purpose there is a Queue tab at the bottom of the page. Clear enough?
The purpose of the Queue tab is to queue the items that are to be downloaded (surprise). This may be tricker than you think at times. The network connection may go up or down. There might be missing credits. All that sort of stuff is dealt with in the Queue tab. One by one the items are downloaded. There is a slight pause between each item. Slowly but surely this queueing process will chew its way through the files you rack up in the queue. Progress will show you how far you have come and Details will show you if any errors occurred.
If any errors occur, try to figure out what is causing them and then hit the Retry Erroneous button. Normally the nDAC software should ask to install readily downloaded items, but if this for some reason is not happening the Install Completed button will trigger this process. Please note that when installing there are a lot of things that happen behind the scenes. We have tried to visualize this with progress bars but sometimes they move so slow that you think that the software has frozen. Oftentimes it hasn't. Patience is once again the key word here when you are dealing with these amounts of data.
The Remove button has several options to it. The ones marked Not Recommended are not recommended for a reason. If you remove them at this point they will still be charged to your account. Why you would do that is beyond our imagination, but the option is there for the day this need arises.
Despite of this fool proof download procedure things are bound to go wrong. Much according to the same rules that state that marmelade sandwiches always must fall on the floor jam side down. An extension to Murphy's law says that if something goes wrong, it is probably the thing that causes the most damage that fails. The same holds true for the nDAC software. Should something go wrong while you download and we take away credits from you, please copy and paste, or save, the information behind the Log tab for us and we will send Mr. Murphy back to where he came from.
The buttons in the Quick Select interface are your friends. Click New Airports and all airports that you do not previously have will be selected. Click Updated Airports and all airports that you do have, that have not been updated, will be selected. Click the None button if you want to start over.
When do you use these buttons? Well, say a new index has been downloaded and the nDAC software proposes to select all updated airports for you. At this point you probably think to yourself "Hey, that is just a nasty little trick to have me spend more credits." and then you cancel the offer by a click of a Cancel button. However, a few minutes after you think to yourself "Hey, that selection function wasn't such a bad idea after all. Clicking all these airports manually is boring." Now, this is when you click the Updated Airports button and save yourself an afternoon and a unknown number of possible double downloads.
This section of the help files describes the menus located at the top of the main interface.
This is where you go to import and export data, adjust setting or to close the application.
There are a few import alternatives which you can chose if you want to read from a previous backup. There is also the possibility to localize previous installations of nDAC and read the database from a previous version into the current one. Note that the import replaces current data with data from the import.
If you joined us from nDAC 2.0 or higher, pleas skip this paragraph: Due to differences in format, data that has been imported from nDAC 1.0 cannot be exported by nDAC 2.0 or higher. However, if nDAC 1.0 airports have been updated once in nDAC 2.0 or higher the data can be exported so that it can be read in version nDAC 2.0 or higher. (The reason is that there is a little XML-file with airport information that did not exist in nDAC 1.0 but which was added in nDAC 2.0. All future import and export functions rely on this XML-file. One update in nDAC 2.0 or higher is sufficient to add this XML-file to the airport. An nDAC 1.0 which has not been updated does not have this XML-file.)
From nDAC 3.0 and onwards there is the possibility to perform partial backups. By exporting our Airport Charts for example, you can be sure to revert to them later if your experience problems or have to reinstall the nDAC software.
The export produces DAT-files. Note that they can only be read into nDAC software that has been registered to the same user name that once exported the file.
In this part you affect connection, backup intervals and appearance of the nDAC software.
In this interface you may set the address (or URL to be correct) to the nDAC application server. This is how the nDAC application calls home. If you change this without being asked, the application will not run since there will be no one answering in the other end. It might be that we ask you to change this for a sequence of numbers, but that is only when you have network problems and we need to bypass DNS servers.
Below there is an interface that allows for proxy settings. A proxy server is a computer that relays your calls to the nDAC application server. You need to set is address (URL), port, user name and password. Best guess is to keep in deactivated since in all honesty there is not very many people that use this. If you've come this far, and really need to use this interface, you probably know what all the fields are for.
The units interface lets you change from metric to imperial system. The changes ar visible in the ADI text information and when performing calculations in the Airport Index proximity filter options. The content of the charts is not changed since this is a static document.
We deliberately included an annoying little backup reminder in the nDAC software. Once a week has passed and you still haven't got a fresh backup of your files it suggests to do so. If you want to quit this reminder and do when backups when you please, you are of course free to turn it off in this interface – but from here on you are on your own. Backup is good. Leave it on is our recommendation.
The next menu is View. Here you can hide certain parts of the interface to make better space to see your charts in full screen.
So, here is the help. You can go here to see the help, in addition to going via the Learning Center tab and the Online Content interface. Personally we find this part particularly amusing: The help file explaining where to find the help file. Well, you found it...
You may check if there are new versions of the nDAC by selecting this option from the Help menu. If there is a new version available, it will ask to be downloaded and installed. Note that this will require a restart of the nDAC software.