Greetings all.

 

I'm an FSX weekend pilot, just for fun, nothing serious, but have noticed an issue when flying that I don't know if it's me or just the system so am hoping for help.

 

I often fly jets and regularly hop along using flight levels.

 

I also use real weather settings injected into FSX from FSGlobalWeather or Opus  (same issue on both).

 

After passing 18,000 I always reset my altimiter to 29.92 going up and back to appropriate setting when going down and the altitude jumps appropriately, however, the altitude shown by FSX using shift F12 still shows the altitude based on the baro pressure when above 18000.

 

When the pressure  is off by a margin from 29.92 below 18000, ie 29.62 or 30.42 for example, this is enough to get ATC telling me that I am at 0 feet above (or below) my assigned altitude and to climb or descend as appropriate.

 

alternatively I get you are out by 200/300/400, climb or descend when my alt is showing exactly the FL assigned.

 

Is there something I am missing, or is this just "an issue" with default ATC and FSX?  alternatively, are there settings I can change to give me a greater variance before ATC starts yelling?

 

Regards and thanks in advance for any help.

 

Graham

This is one of the reasons many of us, use 3rd party weather programs, like ASE, or OPUS, as they handle this. I assume you use the default weather system?

sigh... he said he uses OPUSFSX

sigh... he said he uses OPUSFSX

Oops! Missed that. I use ASE, and never had this issue when I used Default ATC. I use PFE now!

what atc is that?

what atc is that?

PFE = Proflight 2000 Emulator Deluxe - Is one of the older 3rd party ATC replacement programs, made by the same developers of FDC Live Cockpit, It actually comprised of 2 programs. ProFlight 2000 which was the original program for FS2000 This provided scripted adventure type ATC, So as long as you followed along the script you sort of had ATC. The second program Proflight Eulator was developed for FS2004/FSX. It takes the adventure files created by PF2000 and sets up actual interactive ATC in FS2004 or FSX that also interacts but not control AI. It runs as an external app, so it takes no memory away from FSX and as such there is no performance penalty. It uses actual recorded voices, and if you buy the optional voice pack (Which entitles you to an additional free voice pack (Xpack2) available on their support forum) will give you 99 voices in total separated by region. It handles both ICAO and FAA style ATC, because though of it's age, and that it's no longer actively developed for some of the latest FAA changes, ike Line Up and Wait is not implemented. It also handles Oceanic SELCAL positioning reporting With the 2 program concept, it takes a couple of extra step to setup, but it's not too bad, It takes me about 1 minute to convert an FSX flightplan. Here's a sample flight I did with it in the Q400