Yes, but that's the difference between real life and test questions. In real life you know you are approaching the flag flip and expect then see the momentary flag or lack to To/From or hesitation as the unit tries to decide. Then it comes back.
OTOH, on the test, you are presented with the rough equivalent of flying along unconscious, waking to find the VOR showing an off course indication and no flag, and being knocked unconscious again after less than a second has passed. Then, when you wake up, you have to say where you were during that brief moment of consciousness.
I was just explaining for those working on the rating what the real world radios do.
Doesn’t change the answer on this particular question whether you “saw it coming” in the airplane or “woke up” and saw it on the test question presented, though.
No TO/FROM, you’re perfectly abeam of the station on the 90 degree mark of whatever course you have selected.
“OFF” would be a different story. Then you’d better be turning up the volume on the nav radio in the real world and seeing if the thing went Tango Uniform.
If you have no “OFF” flag and just the in-between state, technically the question asked is crap. If you “woke up” and saw that, your first move would be to make sure the stupid thing is receiving anything at all, since quite a few OBS heads don’t “park” the needle out of sight when there’s no input signal at all.
Good ones do. That needle would be buried behind the barrier and you wouldn’t even be able to see it in the FAA’s theoretical question on most modern OBS indicators. That’s the real problem with that question, as posed. You wouldn’t have a missing TO/FROM and a needle still in view at all, on a good quality OBS head.
There are other VOR questions in the pool that are sneakier, but this one is pretty straightforward. Even if it’s crap, compared to a real modern OBS’ behavior.
What I’m curious about though is whether FAA is clear about the TO/FROM flip in their supporting textbooks. I haven’t gone looking yet to see if they base the question off of something they say in the Instrument Flying Handbook. It SHOULD be there or the question is seriously crappy.
It’s hard for people who don’t “get” analog radio or grew up with all digital toys to understand that this radio and OBS are just a simple phase comparison circuit and not all that damned smart about their actual location.
I know you like to geek out, and anyone interested can also follow along if they have about a half hour to see how a VOR actually works...
(Bonus: Toward the end you learn exactly why an in-flight VOR check is only good if it’s within 6 degrees. There’s actually a solid electronics and RF engineering reason for it. Multipath!)
And ...
I’m going to smack you when I see you for that “reverse sensing” wisecrack. You know there’s no such thing on a VOR, just an OBS that’s set wrong for the direction the aircraft is traveling.
Save that silly “reverse sensing” garbage terminology all of us poor instructors have to use it (of which there’s technically no such thing, it’s “sensing” just fine, you’re just headed the wrong direction and think the indications look backward to you...) for the discussion about relative location to a Localizer signal, which is a completely different beast.
Anyway. Enjoy the video. Some pretty cool RF engineering problems and solutions (for their day) in a VOR station.
