The moment of gestalt happened with a piece of paper.

“I don’t understand some things about VOR…” My voice trailed off. I didn’t feel like I even knew enough to formulate a decent question, and I hate just saying, essentially, “I don’t get it.” I was sitting with my instructor, Mark Scheele, across the desk, peppering him with the various questions I’d accumulated from a day’s worth of studying.

He started writing on his notepad, which was a good thing since seeing something on paper is extremely helpful for me in learning.

In the process of explaining, he drew the diagram you see in here. He placed the hole in the center over the VOR symbol on the sectional, and began explaining how the OBS would be set up for various scenarios.

I got it.

I mean, it’ll be different in the airplane and I’ll need to work on it, but I understood it as a concept. After watching the DVD and the summary in the book that accompanied it, I was completely befuddled.

Sure, I understand the “wheel spoke” concept, and the idea of a reciprocal, but the rest…meh. As far as I was concerned, it was all an area of ambiguity.

Here’s a free “cleaned-up” version of the diagram my instructor drew for me (PDF).