Hi, I am also new to VATSIM and since with friends we are establishing Slovenia vACC I am curious about ProController. Are there any GOOD manuals to work with it since I see there are some codes You need to enter (.msg, .atis...)? I try to connect but mainly without success even I use LJU-OBS callsign, Observer as rating, and I would like to be observer. I see in ServInfo some traffic in Croatia or Italy but nothing on ProController.But I have almost no problems with SB (no problems=it works almost all the time, but it happens that I see notice Squawkbox has left the session suddenly during the flight...)Thanks in advanceGoranFSSLovenia 2002www.avsim.com/slovenia

Well... I'm not sure how much you know about PC, so I'll staert at the very beginning. Maybe someone can turn this into a little tutorial manual file or something... ;)You need to create a Pro Controller sector file for the airspace in Slovenia that you intend to control in. This is a very time consuming and involved process but well worth it in the end as you get to know the airspace extremely well. Just tonight, I finished the new Albuquerque Center 4.0 file - it's taken my team and I close to 3 weeks to do. Should be uploaded to the VZAB site within a few days.A sector file tells Pro Controller the lat/lon coordinates of all your airports/runways, VOR's, NDB's, fixes, airways, ARTCC boundaries, all the way up to the more complex things such as MVA (minimum vecotring altitudes) areas and complex DP's/STAR's with multiple transistions... Think of it as drawing your airspace and the procedures availiable within it using lat/lon coordinates.The site I used to learn how to do it is actually part of our competing online ATC organization, IVAO. I won't hold it against them though, as it's a excellent referrence for making files. ;) The tutorial is here: http://www.ivao.org/training/tutorials/sectorfile/When you're making the file, it is absolutely CRUCIAL that you get the spacing and order of the categories exactly right. You may only enter numbers/letters and spaces, no tabs, special characters or anything like that. There are several ordering methods that seem to work flawlessly, and I ended up using a different one than what's shown on IVAO. Email me and I'll send you the file so you can see what I mean. Even one little space can make much of your file not display, cause errors in PC, etc...The reason you're not seeing any aircraft when you load up PC, (assuming you're not loading a sector of your area) is because PC doesn't know where to look! The first few lines of code in the sector file, called the (INFO) section, tell Pro Controller where on the earth's surface to center your radar. For example, my file centers on the ONM (Soccoro, NM) VOR since its very close to the center of our airspace. Note that you can move around and recenter on any airport, VOR, NDB or fix by right clicking in the radar screen and chosing from the list. Another important function in the INFO section is the magnetic deviation setting - this will play havoc with your runway centerlines and vectoring-T's if you don't set it correctly!The next section is (VOR), which is where you define their locations and names/frequencies. You'll have to find a good resource for getting the coordinates for these, along with all the other locations you'll need.(NDB) is exactly like VOR - we didn't use it for NDB's though, we used it to display MVA altitude labels. This procedure is covered in the readme file for the Los Angeles Center sector, (www.laartcc.org) which is where we got the idea.(FIXES) is where you define, you guessed it, airspace fixes! You want to ideally include only fixes that you know are going to be used a lot in pilot flightplans... Our rule making our new file was that we'd only include fixes that were part of published Instrument Approach Proceedures (IAP), Departure Procedures (DP also known as SID), Standard Terminal Arrivals (STAR) and ones which are part of published high altitude enroute airways.An important concept about the above 3 categories - when you get down to making the SID/STAR and the airways, you can use any VOR, NDB or FIX in place of typing the LAT/LON (AIRPORT) is used more than anything just to let PC know where the airports are for centering purposes. You can also turn them on really quick to see where a smaller airport you might not be familiar with is if a pilot files to it...(RUNWAY) is where you define runways at the airports you defined in the previous section. You enter the names of both runways, followed by the magnetic heading for those runways which have ILS approaches. It's very important that you use 000 for any runway in which you won't be vectoring planes onto an ILS. It produces a TON of vectoring-T clutter if you have the magnetic heading in there for every runway. Only a few airports in our file have the headings, mainly the big ones like Phoenix, Albuquerque, Tucson, etc... Next you type in the coordinates for both ends of the runway, which tells PC to draw a line segment between those two points, representing a runway!(SID) is where the fun starts. This section is designed for creating the published Standard Instrument Departures (now officialy known as DP's) out of your airports. You access then from the IAP menu option in PC. To make them, simply type the names of the waypoints that define each segement of the proceedures.For example the Phoenix SILOW1 DP looks like this in our file:

KPHX SILOW1.SILOW		 PXR						   THOMM						  THOMM						 HAPPN						  HAPPN						 SILOW

Notice that each leg starts with the same point that ended the previous leg. I simply placed each name right where the latitude coordinate would begin for each point. PC knows that you've already defined those points back in your VOR and FIXES sections, so you don't have to type out a bunch of coordinates anymore!!(STAR), (HIGH AIRWAY) and (LOW AIRWAY) work in exactly the same fashion.(ARTCC), (ARTCC LOW) and (ARTCC HIGH) are where you create your airspace boundaries. What we did in our file is the following:ARTCC - used to create the 40nm TRACON boundary rings around our large airports.ARTCC LOW - used to make the MVA area boundaries.ARCC HIGH - used to make the ZAB center boundaries and small segments of the surrounding centers for reference when giving handoffs etc...(GEO) is a cool category as it allows you to draw anything into your file in any color you want. We used it for drawing the published government/US Air Force restricted areas, particularly the huge White Sands Missile Range complex near Alamagordo, NM along with the Air Force bombing proactice ranges in western Arizona.Geo can also be used to draw in coastlines, state/country boundaries etc... See the Los Angeles Center file for an amazing example of how well a coast line can be rendered.The boundary area coordinates for centers, restricted areas etc... can be found in the DAFIF database, published for free by the NIMA organization. Their site is here - http://164.214.2.62/products/digitalaero/dafifindex.cfmCorey Wirun has written an excellent program called GNDmaker that is able to interpret and import this data straight into a PC sector file automatically.The other use for (GEO) is what the GNDmaker program was written for - making Ground and Tower sector files with extremely detailed drawings of an airport and all it's taxiways, ramps, ILS beams etc... GNDmaker allows you to get in a plane in FS and "trace" the taxiways and anything else you want straight into a sector file!! It's going to be an unbelieveable time-saver when the program gets out of beta and is released to the public. The site is here: http://wirun.homelinux.net/gndmaker/That about covers it! Hope this has helped you guys out, good to see more people getting into this! One day we'll have the whole VATSIM world covered with ATC!Ryan MaziarzVZAB ATC

Hi Ryan!I a sorry to respond so late but I must really thank You for Your reply. It did help me, I went to IVAO to DL Slovenia sector so I have Slovenia now in. I have also learned, that I can connect as Observer/Observer only for now (which is OK for now) but hmm.. When I connect to VATSIM, a small white LOGIN window opens. I have found that I can send .msg server login message only by copy-paste into main window after a couple of days. But now I just connect and after a few seconds server disconnects me. What is happening? So it is a little bit more obvious that after succesfull login (once it lasted for a whole minute!) I am too soon disconnected to see any aircraft ;((Thank You again for your reply. I have also printed it.Best regardsGoran