GNS 530 crashes during recent flights

[Boeing_Driver 76]

So I've had Reality XP's GPS for years now, and its always served me well.

For some reason, it seems to be crashing my sim now, about ten to twenty minutes into any given flight. I'm fairly sure that the GNS 530 is the culprit, since I can do the exact same flight without turning it on, and there are no issues.

 

Specifically, what happens is that the screen freezes and nothing works (can't change views, can't escape without CTRL + ALT + Delete).

 

If memory serves there is something that fixes this, like a registry that needs to be deleting or something like that but I could be wrong.

 

Anyone have any ideas?

[kevin1566 2]

Sounds/feels like a memory conflict, have you changed your garmin trainer version, or added another addons, there is the tedious way of doing a parallel install of fsx and adding it to a vanilla setup and trying to find the fault that way, as you said you have had it for years so what has changed recently in your installation, two processes trying to grab the same memory addresses.

[Boeing_Driver 76]

I haven't changed anything, although its been quite a while since I last flew in the sim.

 

The thing is, after a sim freeze, if I reboot the sim, the GNS shows a see-through face (the frame is there but you can se through the display).

 

If I reboot the computer, it comes back and works normally until the next sim freeze.

[RXP 2,336]

As always, the first step to troubleshoot this peculiar issues is to start looking into the rxpGnsSim.log and rxpGNS.log (or rxpGnsSim.dll.log and rxpGNS.xpl.log or rxpGNS.gau.log) files in "my documents" folder.

 

Usually a "see through" gauge means it failed to start the trainer in the background (and this info is most likely in the log files). In you case, failing to start the trainer is certainly because although the trainer crashed, it is still loaded in your computer as a zombie program, and prevents starting another instance. In this case, simply launching the "task manager" and manually killing the trainer process will permit starting it again. 

[Boeing_Driver 76]

After searching elsewhere for an answer to this issue, I found what I thought might work for me on another RXP related forum. It suggested deleting the GNSW_530.mem file, located in the Documents section. Rather than delete it, I just moved it and the unit has been working flawlessly ever since. :smile:

[RXP 2,336]

I've forgotten about this one, good find!

 

the ".mem" file is a local copy of the GNS non volatile memory file. The real unit saves its own settings, user waypoints and flight plans in embedded flash memory. The trainer simulates this via a file on the hard drive. Our GNS makes a copy of the file (one copy per unit type and unit number) and it looks like the file has got corrupted somehow.

 

This can unfortunately happen when the trainer process crashes in the middle of saving data to the file for example.

[UIWM 1]

I found that given you don't restart 430/530 unit during your flightsim session, it almost certainly won't crash, BUT you have to assign "affinity mask" for garmin proccess (task manager/details) to the last core only (uncheck all other cores) at the beginning of each flight AND restart PC before each flight. This solution tends to work for me for 80% of the time. This adds so much hassle given that the 430/530 is typically used on GA aircraft, with several landings/etc, you naturally want to do several flights without closing flightsim. This is madness, sorry, but even real-world driving doesn't give you as much anger as when some bs sim garbage crashes constantly.

Yet Reality-XP decided to abandon excising customers without resolving this bug and pursue X-Plane. No need to mention again lack of navdata support from navigraph/etc, expecting sim customers to use several years old navdata is simply disrespectful these days. I don't care how accurately you replicate all those features if the primary objective of gnss unit - safe navigation/sit awareness using actual and relevant navdata can not be achieved. Shame on you, Reality Xp.

 

My win is 8.1 and FSX, in case anyone is having stable 430/530 on win 8.1, could you please post your RXPGNS.INI config as I'm convinced some settings may actually cause this problem (although I tried many combinations).

[RXP 2,336]

On June 8, 2017 at 9:13 PM, EGSC2 said:

BUT you have to assign "affinity mask" for garmin proccess (task manager/details)

You shouldn't need to 'manually' outsmart the processes, when the RXP GNS offers a setting to specifically set your preferred affinity (if the default handling is not satisfactory to you).

in your RXPGNS.INI file, in the [GNSXXX] section

// sets the preferred CPU the trainer runs on. value range: 1 to 16
// use 0 to set last core available - default setting
// use -1 to set default Garmin Trainer (should be CPU1)

CPU =
 

[RXP 2,336]

On June 8, 2017 at 9:13 PM, EGSC2 said:

No need to mention again lack of navdata support from navigraph/etc, expecting sim customers to use several years old navdata is simply disrespectful these days. I don't care how accurately you replicate all those features if the primary objective of gnss unit - safe navigation/sit awareness using actual and relevant navdata can not be achieved

The product is not sold with a database update included, but you can subscribe to Jeppesen database updates and get the most accurate data if you wish.