SWEET!!! Now lets see where those places are…
I am allll over that! I put my created beacon on one of the Airfields across the Chanell. Off I went at 250 plus. What a Nasty body of water… Bleirot was a ballzy guy. It took forever but… DF broght me right to the airfield. Im really enjoying DF in the Skeeter and I will never make a mission without it.
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Are these beacons built into Normandy map already or do they need to be placed/created by the user?
They need to be placed in the mission editor by the user. I think they are present in all missions on the PO server though.
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Ah that link you posted with the coordinates and frequencies they used helped a lot. I’ll add a couple of them to my Normandy and Channel sandboxes. Still haven’t figured out how I can mess with the Mossie’s aft radio while flying low level simultanously, though.
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You need a buddy in the navigator seat. There’s no way to do it safely at low level. To do a triangulation you will need to manipulate the frequency as well as the loop antenna and that’s just not possible. However as far as I know it wasn’t reliable at low level and low level navigation was mainly done by course, speed and landmarks
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Or to have a good flight lead who knows where they are going 
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I’m guessing pre-setting it on the ground to get on and maintain a desired course doesn’t work too well?
For triangulation you will need to switch between beacons in flight and manipulate the loop antenna, so no, that doesn’t work.
The P8 compass actually works amazingly well when used correctly as @tempusmurphy can attest. It’s magnetic so it doesn’t drift like the direction indicator and it’s very easy to verify at a glance that you are on course when you set it correctly for your current leg of the flight. Set your desired course on the compass and all you have to check is whether the compass needle aligns with the marker on the dial. No reading off numbers or anything else required. Once you reach your next turn you look for your landmark, set a new course on the compass and make sure you overfly your nav point (the landmark) on course.
Edit: if you are just using it as a direction finder you can of course dial it in on the ground but that’s not very useful for anything but flying back to the beacon. The real strength of the radio equipment is in doing more complex things like triangulating your position, flying a very specific arc at a specific speed and altitude to drop fire bombs to mark targets for Lancaster bombers at night (something not done by the FB but the bomber variant which we don’t have in DCS, I think reflected scripted something like that for his Mosquito campaign though, look up the oboe system) or doing an instrument approach at night or in low visibility conditions.
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I love the Mirage Biplace
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Main problem I have with the P8 is the combination of wind drift and gyroscopic procession. I always end up 1~2 miles left of where I should be even when staying on course.
Yes you will have to acount for that by adjusting course especially in windy conditions, flying a speed that is easily divided by 60 for a quick back of the envelope calculation also helps and your landmarks should be distinct and easily spotted at low level. Cathedrals and other tall buildings, distinct hills, a very distinct tree that’s sticking out of the landscape ( the latter not really something you can do in DCS though), large river valleys. Stuff that’s not suited for low level navigation are roads or train tracks unless you can directly follow them, smaller rivers or lakes etc. Since DCS reuses quite a lot of assets on maps, picking distinct landmarks can be a big challenge sometimes if you don’t know the area very well.
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In his, Terror in the Starboard Seat, Mossie navigator Dave McIntosh talks about how they used a cruising speed of 240 mph, because you can divide it by 60 and get 4 miles per minute during flight planning. Of course I was thinking does he mean GS or IAS, but later he says that they rarely calculated for wind drift due to their always flying low altitude. I guess that he means this is a rare case where GS is close to IAS. He probably also thought that a mention of magnetic declination would be beyond the average reader’s interest.
On the other hand, he talks about his pilot, Sid, randomly picking other targets, like being over Ingolstadt and deciding to patrol Munich at 2:30 am. Then he would ask Dave for a home heading and not be happy if they were a couple of miles off crossing the English coast. Excellent read for DCS Mossie pilots, BTW.
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Yeah, I rarely do as well. It’s not really necessary for the way I plan my missions and I know the map really well after flying on it every weekend for over 4 years 
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Main thing with cathedrals I’ve found in Normandy 2.0 is that most cathedrals are copy-pasted, so I don’t know if I’m actually at the right town or the one next to it with an identical steeple
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