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Welcome to the Simulator Manual

This is the operator's guide to the NMEA GPS Simulator web interface. It is organized one page per UI tab or major area, so you can find any control by walking down the left-hand navigation in the order you'd encounter it in the app.

If you're brand new to the project, start at Overview and Quick Start first. If you've already got a container running and just want to understand what a specific control does, you're in the right place.

How this manual is organized

Section When to read it
Login First time accessing the UI, or when reasoning about authentication / BYPASS_AUTH.
Dashboard Overview Orientation - the main app layout, header, mode tabs, panels.
Operating modes (Rebroadcaster, Sender, Receiver, Stand-Alone) One page per operating mode. Pick the one matching what you're doing.
Per-feature pages (NMEA Sentences, Serial Output, Navigation Controls, Output Viewer, Status Display, Airport Lookup) Reference for cross-cutting UI features that show up in more than one mode.
Common UI Elements Header, theme toggle, multi-browser sync, help dialog - anything that lives outside the mode-specific panels.
Appendix Troubleshooting tables, env-var reference, glossary, the security flag index used during screenshot capture.

Conventions in this manual

Convention Meaning
!!! tip / !!! warning / !!! danger / !!! info boxes Tip is recommended-do; warning is unexpected behavior; danger is destructive; info is background context. Read them - the per-control tables are the floor, the admonitions are where most operators get tripped up.
Per-control reference tables Every control on a panel gets a row with its default, valid values, and what changes when you flip it.
<host> placeholder Stands in for the IP or hostname of the container running the simulator (or, in the dashboard manual, the dashboard container).
Screenshot at the top of each page Overview shot of the panel under discussion. Detail screenshots inside the page only appear when a sub-state (modal open, edit form) is visually different.
Cross-links to env vars When a UI control has a matching auto-start env var, the persistence table at the end of the page connects them. The authoritative env-var reference is Environment Variables.

A note on screenshots

Screenshots in this manual are captured from the live running deployment, not a mockup. If you see a value, a target IP, a simulator name in a screenshot, it was real - just sanitized after capture per the security-flag index in the appendix.

If your UI looks slightly different from a screenshot, check the page's footer line for the version it was captured against. Stale screenshots get rebuilt as features change.

When you get stuck

Symptom Where to look
The app loaded but the Start button stays disabled The button's tooltip lists the missing field. Most common: no output selected, missing simulator name when EFB is on, no USB device when USB output is on.
EFB iPad never sees the simulator Connecting ForeFlight or Connecting Garmin Pilot.
USB serial output never appears on the downstream device USB Serial (Bad Elf).
Fleet Dashboard card stays gray Fleet Monitoring and Health Chain.
Any other symptom Troubleshooting and the per-page Appendix at the end of this manual.

What's next