My Notes on the FTS FM120

The X-Plane manual is your friend.

The normal simulator display is (naturally) a view from the cockpit.

But sometimes it’s useful to see things from another point-of-view, (often outside the aircraft altogether), especially when running a replay or to check control movement during preflight.

You can see the keyboard commands for moving the simulator viewpoint here in the X-Plane manual

Out-of-the-box, N47 is represented very sparsely in X-Plane with a scene consisting of asurface derrived from terrain data (scrubbed of vegetation and auto-generated buildings and roads) and a runway and taxiway based on FAA data.

It simply doesn’t deliver a very immersive experience. Conspicuous by it’s absence is the Limerick Nuclear Generating Station, whose huge cooling towers are visible for many tens of of miles around from the ground and much further in the air.

So back in 2012, I created some enhanced scenery data for the area (demonstration video here), and wehn the FM120 came to the airport it was just a natural to make it available to Paul for use in the sim. I’ve enhanced it quite a bit sinve the 2012 version and included a start on scenery for nearby KPTW as well.

You can find the official docs here: http://www.flythissim.com/store.html

Speaking of "how to correctly twist knobs", I made this little ditty to explain how the FTS-430 (GNS-430 work-alike) GPS controls seem to work in SimAVIO:

Pushing buttons on a touchscreen is easy. Turning knobs is a bit different…​you have to touch the knob to activate it and drag out while a white line confirms you have the knob selected, then move in a circular motion around the knob to simulate turning it clockwise or counterclockwise. The white line follows your finger while you hear a clicking sound. The further out you move your finger from the center of the button, the more precise your control. And the movement is scaled: one full turn of the virtual knob is often several trips of your finger around the knob on the touchscreen.

So much for muscle memory…​

But the GNS-430 knobs are a special challenge…​they have concentric inner and outer knobs and can also be pushed.

As far as I can determine, this is how that works:Touching the green areas in the screenshot above selects the outer (big) knob. Touching the red areas selects the inner (small) knob. And touching the blue areas simulates pushing the knob in. Missing the red or green areas and hitting the blue means you have to touch the blue again, because the knob-push is a toggle action button; swapping between com and nav on the left-had radio side, and entering and leaving cursor mode on the right-hand GPS side.

(The SimAVIO preferences menu has a checkbox for "Disable Spiral Touch". It doesn’t work and they don’t intend to fix it.)

Interestingly enough, this used to be worse.

And then…​

http://www.flythissim.com/TTReleaseNotes.php

The release notes also mention this device:

http://www.leobodnar.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=205

…​suggesting it may be possible to build hardware knobs that will work with SimAVIO.

Just before a recent sim night, Paul ran into a problem where the SimAVIO computer seemed to be completely inoperable. Power was up but nothing was being displayed on either touchscreen.

While Paul was on the phone with FTS support negotiating shipping out a replacement, I took advantage of the opportunity to stick my nose under the covers of the visor, which he had removed. I saw for the first time the very spiffy casework of the SimAVIO computer; fit for an uber-pro "gamer", and mused that that beautiful hardware spent all its time hidden from view.

It just seemed to me odd that such high-end gear should pack it in for no obvious reason, and I thought a hardware reset might be in order "just for grins".

The reset button seemed to be recessed, and I couldn’t get my finger on it. My tools were out in the car, so I scrounged around for something small and pointy enough to slip in there and came up with the Allen wrench used to adjust the rudder pedals.

Poking at the reset button with that made it clear that the button had gotten stuck down under the edge of the casework and was constantly forcing PWR OK low, keeping the machine from running; it popped up and the small touchscreen showed its power-on display.

One cycle of the main SimAVIO power switch and all was once again well, and sim night could continue. So that’s something to check if the SimAVIO compy seems to be hors de combat.

Recently we’ve had a problem with the simulator simply going black two-screens-at-a-time after prolonged (>1 hr) use. The suspicion being that possibly we have a cooling problem in the Linux(X-Plane) computer. To help diagnose this, I’ve installed and configured [temperature monitoring software called psensors](http://wpitchoune.net/psensor/). You can find it on the rabbit menu in the upper left corner of screen 1-Left. Click on the upper-right corner of the psensors window and select "always on top" so the window will float over the simulator screen while running.

When troubleshooting issues with the control yoke or rudder pedals, it’s often useful to be able to see what forces X-Plane is seeing on the controls and the resulting effect on the simulated control surfaces. To do this, go to the settings/Data Input and Output menu on the 1-Left screen, and check these boxes…​

it will result in a display in the upper-left corner on that screen:

A stylus pen is a substitute for using your finger to touch a capacitive touch screen. When they work well, the detected touch is more precise and more reliable.

Here’s a nice inexpensive brand I have used (inexpensive is good because you will lose them)

CloudAhoy is a web-based service for debriefing flying missions. It accepts GPS track data (and airborne video), and renders 2D and 3D map views, simulated cockpit view (with or without a HUD) and detailed analysis of your flying.

I’d been working at a way to get X-Plane to output a CloudAhoy-compatible GPS track, but it turns out I was trying too hard. Just install the CloudAhoy mobile app on your iPad or other mobile device (There’s an Android version but you’ll need to install the X-Plane to GPS app because the CloudAhoy Android app apparently doesn’t have X-Plane compatibility built in).

It works quite well. Location data is good. There seem to be some issues with altitude and airspeed; I’m investigating that.

Now an instructor can debrief my home simulator work in between lessons in the real airplane and the FM210.

Oh, noes…​I have invented aviation homework.

Yah, I hear you there…​and that’s one reason I’m enthusiastic about using the sim in instrument training as a student.

So…​ with X-Plane you can put the airplane pretty much anywhere, in any attitude, and with any state vector. You can save the current "situation" to a disk file which includes your position, altitude, attitude and velocity, the aircraft and the state of its systems, but not the weather at the time you saved. SimAVIO has a menu that appears to deal with X-Plane’s "situations" but I don’t know all the details of that not having played with it; I do know that most of the situations currently saved are at the default runway locations for individual airports. There’s one situation file on the disk that’s set up 5 north of Modena VOR at something like 10,000 ft in a C-182, so I’m guessing that one is Paul’s.

The X-Plane screen for "start-anywhere" is kind of involved:

but there’s a simpler "Select Airport" one that does start you on the ground or on three or ten mile finals to that airport’s runways:

I don’t see any random capability…​ oh, wait. There’s a "Get Me Lost" item on the X-Plane location menu. I’ve never used it before.

I just popped it at altitude in the N47 neighborhood and it deposited me someplace near Millville and then when I tried it again, about 15 SSE of Cape May County. So I guess that counts. Don’t know if it’s on the instructor’s console or not, but you can pick it from the X-Plane menu..

The failures menu looks pretty elaborate. Here’s some of it:

So…​I just manually failed both (both!) vacuum pumps, and went back to the sim; the X-Plane AI dropped a flag right away (bit of a give-away) and gradually spun down, after a couple of minutes on partial panel it looked like:

…​so I’d have to rate that as pretty good realism-wise.

How it looks on SimAVIO I don’t know, but there’s lots of data available in the X-Plane network interface:

The visuals seem quite realistic to me, both in terms of the structure of clouds and the effects of low visibility and/or precip. I flew the GPS26 into N47 the other evening under a simulated 1,000' ceiling and it convinced me…​

The weather settings are quite detailed in X-Plane:

…​and the SimAVIO menus seemed to be a decent coverage over those functions, if not 100%.

There’s thousands upon thousands of X-Plane aircraft models, of varying quality because most of them are amateur built.

SimAVIO of course is restricted to stuff they build because it has to work with their panel system rather than the standard X-Plane graphics.

Could have sworn I saw a carb heat knob on one of the Skyhawks, though. Might have been a Skylane.

Yes, the touch screen is OK for push buttons but for knobs it frankly sucks. You have to touch on the knob, drag out a bit to make sure you have the the touch, and then drag in a circle around the knob to simulate turning it. This is challenging enough for a single knob like a heading bug on a DG, but gets trickier for a double knob like the tuning control for a radio and is even worse for two-knobs-and-a-button as on the GNS-430. (That one requires explanation and demonstration, and it’s frankly a pain in the ass in general.)

See Those darned knobs ("Spiral Touch")

The upside is: it’s a huge cost savings and totally reconfigurable in software.

The two guys who are the founders at FTS are Cirrus drivers, and it shows.

Oh, here’s a brochure with some SimAVIO details:

I think it will be excellent for primary students from a visual point of view. That’s one reason I was happy to put a lot of effort into the local scenery data, so that being in the pattern at N47 would look as much like the real world as possible. (Although the U-Haul trucks, the Fly-Elite sign on the hangar and the Spot-A-Pot over by hangar 18 are probably taking it to a model-railroad level of anal-retentive.)

So…​ a mixed bag of answers: some "I’m sure I know this" and some "gee, it works at home but I’m not sure about with simAVIO". All can be experimented with.