I have been using my "new" Piper Seneca which I have come to love as a great a/c for practicing IFR. It has been a long time since I stopped "following the red path on the GPS", nevertheless in bringing it to its paces I have noticed that....

 

In the virtual cockpit there is a (default) Garmin GPS which can be operated from the VC. There is also a GPS pop up which is the same, but...

 

a) The pop up never remembers its last window size. By default is a bit too small i resized it,

but on every flight it comes back as a small window.

 

B) The pop up GPS and the cockpit GPS though they are the same instrument, they seem NOT to share their settings. If for example I press the TERRAIN Button on one, then that is NOT reflected

on the other (at least not from VC to pop up). Don't know about the other settings such as selecting approach, etc.

That is a known limitation of the Carenado GPS... not much you can do, except for replacing it by an RXP unit.

 

The size of the popup, however, you can change.

 

Open up the panel.cfg file with Notepad and look for the WindowXX that has the GPS popup in it. I believe it is Window01..

 

In this Window, you can set the size to anything you like by adding / editing the line:

 

window_size= 0.250, 0.280

 

The first number is the fraction of the screen width, and the second the height.

Thanks for the tip on the size of the GPS, will do that.

 

As for the 2nd part of the post, I believe that is a bug. I have used at least one other a/c in FSX that had the default Garmin GPS embedded in the virtual cockpit but when popped up, the pop up GPS unit would be just as the one in the panel. so the settings applied on one would reflect on the other automatically. I think they are missing a connection of some kind there.

The default GPS in FSX is not much better - I'm not saying it could not be improved, as you point out,

other vendors have shown that it can, but Carenado has chosen not to spend time on that...

The "secret sauce" to make any GPS based on the FS default to "synch" with a popup copy is to edit the XML script and add all of the <Event> <Keys> to the bottom of the file.

 

  <Keys>
  <On Event="GPS_NEAREST_BUTTON">@NRSTButton</On>
	 (* et cetera *)
  </Keys>

 

Once done, the file should be saved with a unique name, and that one used as the "popup" version. That way, if you "click" on say the NRST button on the "popup" version, it will send the "Event" code to the original VC version of the GPS.

That is clever... very nice.

 

Another workaround is to use L-variables that capture the click events.

That is clever... very nice.

 

Another workaround is to use L-variables that capture the click events.

That scheme won't capture keystrokes however, which is something that can be critical. FSX also supports "dual GPS commands" which allows me to have separate control over multiple GNS units. See the SDK's list of "G1000_PFD..." and G1000_MFD..." equivalents.

 

For example, for my GNS530/430 units I use these for the 430:

 

 <Keys>
   <On Event="G1000_MFD_NEAREST_BUTTON">@NRSTButton</On>
   (* et cetera *)
 </Keys>