FSX-SE VoxATC, Radar Contact, ... what shall I ?

[BeechPapa 32]

BeechPapa, here's a link to some of the exchanges that took place on the combined radar position during the opening hour of service on PilotEdge today: http://assets.pilotedge.net/recordings/hourly/2015-1-22_8_17510.mp3

 

How do feel about the clarity and readability there? Note: this link will not work in 3 months from now, that's how long the recordings are kept for QA purposes.

 

Clear as a bell. A little quick for me still, but I am local to SoCal so the runways and procedures are familiar to me. I don't mind as much if people spit out their tail numbers, and tend to associate people with their voices and character more anyway. Speaking of which, I think that's the best part of live ATC, is the different kind of characters you can meet. In that clip, for instance, you could get a feel for the personalities of the pilots. It sounded alot more like real ATC recordings, which I can generally understand. My only concern would be the tolerance for people new to the system (like me) who are still writing things down as they're spoken, adapting to the language, and slower to communicate.

 

 

There are also many non-standard things that can happen during a flight, whether it's requesting an approach other than the one in use, negotiating shortcuts or practice approaches, asking for weather at other fields, or receiving interesting vectors behind other live traffic, ATC is fundamentally dynamic. This is my beef with synthetic systems, they miss this nuances...and ultimately, once you get passed the basics of IFR clearances, taxi, takeoff and landing, what's left is the interesting, dynamic stuff. 

 

How are dynamic events handled on PilotEdge? I read on vatsim guidelines that failures must be approved by controllers before they happen. While I can understand the need to keep from dealing with an excessive situation where every third plane is landing dead-stick, the requirement to plan failures is kind of ridiculous. It defeats the challenge of dealing with an unplanned situation. And many of the top quality addons have random, pilot error, or maintenance based failures that could catch even the pilot completely off guard. 

 

[coma 6]

Failures are fine as long as you handle them in a realistic fashion. 747 going GPS direct from LAX to SFO with a 4 engine-out emergency screaming "mayday mayday!!" is not welcome.  Realistic emergencies are fine and do not require coordination or permission.

 

The PE plugin for xplane, as an example, monitors bus voltage. If it drops below a certain value, your radio is toast. So, if you're on a flight and the alternator goes offline, you need to do what you'd do in real world, shed load and come up with a plan, particularly if you're in IMC. Those are great emergencies. We also have the technology to check your gear state (though the controllers haven't been trained on that yet) so if you suspect there's a gear problem, you can do a low approach at a towered airport and they'll be able to check it out. Those are all fine.

 

We can actually trigger failures in X-Plane from the scope, a feature we currently reserve for commercial clients but will eventually make available for retail customers as well. Here's a great video of one of our users (who has agreed to let us trigger failures on him without notice for testing). I was watching him stream his flight live on twitch, hopped on the scope as an observer and triggered a bird strike. This is the result:

 

That wasn't what I was referring to when I mentioned dynamic events, though. I actually meant things as simple as, "ground, is Alpha the 2nd left or this one right here?"  "Ground, can we pull over here on Alpha for a moment? We need to check something out, should take about 90 seconds."  Those simple examples will result in "say again" from any synthetic system.

 

Regarding your concern for beginners, we have pretty thorough training programs to take you through a detailed series of flights with plenty of resources to make sure you're prepared for each flight (cockpit videos, transcripts, etc).

[JRMurray 214]

Me especially!   It would have been great to get a Basil Fawlty controller set. Even I would have broken the rules to be chastised by him in all his glory! :smile:

 

Ha! I'd pay extra to have a Basil Fawlty controller set! I'd love to hear the Major give confusing directions or Manual responding with "Qué?"

[coma 6]

There's always room for fun & games, listen to this one of a 747 out of LAX that calls for takeoff clearance when he still has 1/2 mile of taxiing to do...(an Aussie pilot and a pseudo-Australian controller). Don't worry, he doesn't control much anymore.

 

http://assets.pilotedge.net/recordings/archive/early_takeoff.mp3

 

(from 10 secs to 1min 39secs)

[Gregg_Seipp 565]

An update on VoxATC.  I spent a good while last night reading through the VoxATC forum and learned a great deal.  Seems that there's a lot of good lore out there that helps.  I bought it this morning and did a flight from KINT to KFKN and it went flawlessly.  Voice recognition was excellent and I'm learning how picky it is about understanding what you say.  I still have a ton of questions about it.  I've also taken a stab at starting an FAQ so that people don't have to go through some of the same frustrations I did.

 

Is it better than live ATC?  Heck no, but it's pretty decent, far better than FSX ATC, and it would work fairly well with live ATC: e.g. if no controller was available or you were starting out from an area that didn't have live ATC, flying into an area that did, you can turn it off when a controller is available.   (Not sure how effective it would be if you flew out of an ATC area where no controller was available.)  With live ATC you'll learn a lot more (and there's a vast amount of information to learn) but, at least with this, you'll have to start learning to absorb and read back all of the info that ATC can throw at you in a burst.  "N614JA, you're six miles from GIMPA, cleared for the ILS Runway two seven, maintain three thousand one hundred until the final approach fix, contact tower one-one-eight point two."

[jcomm 5,890]

Well, this thread is helping me a LOT more than I expected!

 

All of your comments, the fact that I didn't yet commit to a product, specially because I was told that VoxATC isn't yet FSX-SE compatible.

 

I am tempted to try them all :-), but VoxATC still attracts me the most for it's didactic component. Seen a few videos where I can observe a window where it works like in Karaoke - It writes what you are supposed to say to the next CC... This will be great for me !

 

This weekend I still have to find some time also to check another product that just one among you mentioned - "ProFlight  Emulator".

 

Reading from their support page I assume it requires an old fs2000 ATC program installed to run - the original proflight 2000 ?

[ZKOKQ 984]

Hi JC, if you like realistic AI, schedules, etc, then Vox is not for you. I tried the demo, and was quite disappointed.

Airlines pop up in places that they don't fly too like Qantas regional flights flying over Africa. So you need to consider that.

[jcomm 5,890]

Thx Juian! Good hint ! ;-)

[Gregg_Seipp 565]

 

 

Hi JC, if you like realistic AI, schedules, etc, then Vox is not for you. I tried the demo, and was quite disappointed.

Airlines pop up in places that they don't fly too like Qantas regional flights flying over Africa. So you need to consider that.

 

I haven't reinstalled UT2 (and I may not ever) so I haven't tried that...does it not work well?  Does it screw up the schedules? 

[Glynn 405]

 

 

Reading from their support page I assume it requires an old fs2000 ATC program installed to run - the original proflight 2000 ?

 

PFE Deluxe includes everything you need to enjoy ProFlight 2000 including a full working copy of the original ProFlight 2000 program (licensed to us for distribution with PFE by the original publisher and developers of ProFlight). Installation of the PFE Deluxe Edition is much easier too as it is just a one step installation process whereas PFE Standard Edition requires a three stage process.

[jcomm 5,890]

PFE Deluxe includes everything you need to enjoy ProFlight 2000 including a full working copy of the original ProFlight 2000 program (licensed to us for distribution with PFE by the original publisher and developers of ProFlight). Installation of the PFE Deluxe Edition is much easier too as it is just a one step installation process whereas PFE Standard Edition requires a three stage process.

 

Does it work with FSX-SE already ?

 

How do you compare it, for someone willing to simulate ATC more over Europe , with the alternatives?

[Gregg_Seipp 565]

 

 

VoxATC isn't yet FSX-SE compatible.

 

In this post, Zoran's saying Vox works on SE.  He said there was a problem but worked itself out.  Not sure about what he did.  There is a 2 week demo so you could try it.  I'm interested in moving to SE too so it'll be something I'll be looking into.

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/460355-side-by-side-testing-fsx-vs-fsx-se/page-3#entry3162118

[Glynn 405]

 

 

Does it work with FSX-SE already ?



How do you compare it, for someone willing to simulate ATC more over Europe , with the alternatives?

 

Not tried it yet with  FSX-SE

Has the best voices which use regional accents as you fly across country boundaries.

Needs more steps to set up your flight than Radar Contact

Sometimes I have had it lose contact with me but that could be user error or bad flightplan.

 

Certainly not as reliable as Radar Contact which just works every time.

[jcomm 5,890]

Gregg, as soon as I try VoxATC in FSX SE I will let you know about the results.

 

Glynn, thanks for the additional info.

[ZKOKQ 984]

I haven't reinstalled UT2 (and I may not ever) so I haven't tried that...does it not work well?  Does it screw up the schedules? 

Vox takes control of AI completely. So once airborne, the just follow you. That is why you get airlines in places they don't normally fly to. If you use UT2 you have to download UT2 bridge from Vox for it to work. But they will not fly UT2 flight plans

.