AVSIM Commercial Utilities Review SimPlates 2000

Just a few short months ago I started hitting Flight Simulator hard again. My time had been diverted to other non-sense activities such as, oh, work. It was time to let off a little steam and really get back into flying again. Being a career student pilot, the one thing I like about using the flight simulator was the attempt at realism and accuracy. To be able to shoot an IFR approach and stick it is one of the finer things in life. While flying inbound to Seattle-Tacoma one day while using SquawkBox, I was told by the controller to expect the Ephrata Four arrival. The...what? What I learned very quickly that day was that there these things called Standard Terminal Arrivals. Since that day, I've been hooked on trying to apply real world navigation to my simulator. I always did a little radio navigation and I always had the help of a flight plan or FS Navigator, but it didn't show what the correct arrival and departure should be. I was missing two things: 1) The charts needed for the areas I fly in & 2) The money to buy those charts. We all like to fly on a budget, and it just got easier with SimPlates 2000 by Dauntless Software.

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Product Description

SimPlates 2000 is described as, "US-48 States IFR approach plates for use with flight simulators." It is much more then that. SimPlates 2000 includes a mountain of data for the lower 48, Puerto Rico & the Virgin Islands. Information for over 19,000 airports and landing facilities are included. You also get IFR approach plates, which includes data for ILS, VOR, LOC, NDB, SDF, FMS, GPS, TACAN, and RNav. Extra plate information included is Plate Use, STARs, SIDs and Alternate, Takeoff & RADAR Minimums. All of this is included on one CD-ROM. What's even better is the price: $25. And that includes Priority Mail shipping in the US.

Installation

Installation was fairly simple. There is no Autorun file so installation is done manually. The upshot is that you won't get a banner every time you insert the CD. The only installation issue is the possibility of a bogus error message regarding the registration of EXPSRV.DLL. You can ignore the error message as it just means that you already have the file installed. You will get this message, most likely, if you have installed a previous Visual Basic 6 program. In future versions it would be nice to be able to handle the error to make it easier on some users. Some other messages that might come up are Version errors. Just make sure you click to keep your current version and you will be fine. Also, there is a v1.03 available on the Dauntless website. You definitely want to download this patch as it fixes a problem of copying the data files to the hard drive. Once installed, it's time to look at all the goodies.

Operation

While using the software to learn about it for this review, I kept the files on the CD-ROM. Search times were not all that bad. If there is anyone out there that still has an older CD-ROM drive or PC, they might want to consider copying the data files to the hard drive. This option will take up another 545MB of space. The first time you run the program it will ask for the location of the data files. If you copy the files later, the program is able to find them locally without having to pick again.

The first thing you see when you start SimPlates is the tabbed selection screen. This is the starting point for all of your searches. If you are looking for airport information, you can find it by location or approach type. Searching by approach type shows you how complete this package is (Figure 1). With seventeen plate/approach selection boxes, you get the feeling that what you are looking for is in there. After speaking with Dauntless, they were confident that most (>99%) of the information available is in the product. SimPlates seems very complete. After looking around this screen, you may notice that a feature that was mentioned before is missing: STARs.

This is the area I had problems with also. I immediately hopped in and tried to find the Ephrata Four arrival for Seattle-Tacoma. I saw ILS, VOR, NDB, Visual, Airport and SID information, but no STAR. Now, I know there is one (refer to motivational factor mentioned before) and I see a SID. It's got to be in here. Well, as I found out after talking to Dauntless, it is. The information that SimPlates provides is separated by airport information and regional information. In the books that this information comes from, for a reason that wasn't clear by Dauntless or me, SIDs are included in the published airport information and STARs are published in their own volume by region (Figure 2), hence the different locations in SimPlates. This also holds true for the extras that SimPlates includes: Special Minimums (Takeoff/Departure, Alternate & Radar), Preferred Routes and Information. And extras is used loosely. A gander at the Information Plates tab shows even more good information including: Interpreting IAP Plans and Profile Views, Legend for STARs, DPs and Instrument Approach Plates, Common Abbreviations and Rate of Climb and Rate of Decent Tables, just to name a few.

Test System PII-450mhz Windows98/NT 4.0 256 Megs RAM Elsa GLoria Synergy+ Wicked VooDoo II Creative PC-DVD ROM Figure 1-Searching for airports by Location Figure 2-STAR listings showing regions in the pulldown. Figure 3-Search by airport name with criteria already typed in. Figure 4-After airport is selected, all available plates are shown in the Plates section. Figure 5-With every plate there is a "kneeboard" area to write ATC information.

The next step is getting the data in usable form. The search routine for locating an airport, for example, is very easy to use. You can search by ID, Name or State (Figure 3). The search engine was designed to try and drill down the information until you can find the ID you are looking for. When you type a character, all IDs that don't fit the criteria are eliminated. This makes looking for an airport very quick and efficient. This search method is used by all areas of SimPlates. Once you have located your airport, you click on it to highlight the ID and all information available about that airport is presented in the "Plates" section (Figure 4). Your next choice is to View/Print the plate or to export the information to a .pdf file. Per Dauntless (and myself), the .pdf export isn't recommended. The quality of the plate is diminished when run through the .pdf export filter. Printing the plate directly from SimPlates is the preferred method. For those of you that just want to use it on the screen, the plates can be a little hard to read sometimes but is still very usable. To accomplish fitting all the information onto one CD, all of the scans were done at 300dpi. The trade off of using 300dpi scans would be the advantage of using only one CD versus multiple CDs. On the other hand, the printout of the plates were very nice on my HP DeskJet 850C and even better off of a HP LaserJet 4. Another nice feature is that all the plates have an area for writing information while you are flying. A "kneeboard" spot for filling in ATC information helping with readbacks (Figure 5). Unfortunately, do to the nature of the output, it is very hard to show the difference on a web site. Another piece of information you can get is Airport Facilities information. An example of my home airport is here. This information is presented in your default browser. Another browser presented piece is NAVAID information. Again, you can look at an example of the MSO VOR information is been seen here.

Conclusion

SimPlates 2000 feels like a complete product. For a casual and the Virtual Airline flyer like me, there is more then enough information presented to keep me busy for quite awhile. Also, with all this information, I have found myself flying around different areas to check the realism of MS Flight Simulator. The one thing to keep in mind, also, is that what makes this package attractive is the price. Dauntless has spent an extraordinary amount of time putting this information in, and it's all yours for $25. Compared to similar products, SimPlates has the right price point to make it a very popular product indeed.

Future plans call for an International version of SimPlates. Exactly what areas of the world this will cover has not be released yet. Also, Dauntless initially thought that they would not be able to get Alaska and Hawaii on one CD which is why they are not included. Dauntless has stated that this was incorrect and they are planning on releasing the Alaska and Hawaii information. The Alaska and Hawaii information will also most likely make up the information for a downloadable demo that Dauntless plans on releasing.

SimPlates is available directly from the developer, Dauntless Software.