Yes, you can do what you're trying to do.

It sounds like the program is "freezing" when it is trying to get the weather or possibly when looking for elevation data or map tiles.

When you say it "freezes" what exactly does it do?  What error messages are there?

Try changing the Weather source on the Wx tab of Config.

Dave

there was several kind of freezes ( i don't know the exact term due to my poor english) but in general, the program was not responding without any kind of messages , or crash report , until i try to close the program . Anyway, i've just finished to download the last version and this evening (if i have the time) i will do a test flight in the same conditions to see if there is any improvment .

But if you say that it's possible to experiment any of these three scenario , it's a good news , because i will practice easily in a short time the different flight procedures  during an approach around an airport , without the heaviness of the flight plan .

So, to resume, press "connect" button and calling the ground/tower/frequencies of the airport directly and the VFR following is engaged ?... great !

And keep on the good work Dave !

VFR Following is not engaged automatically.  If you want VFR Flight Following, then you have to either file a VFR Flight Plan and request Clearance, or you have to make a call while airborne something like "<CallSign> request VFR Flight Following from Kilo Delta Foxtrot Whiskey to Kilo Foxtrot Tango Whiskey at five thousand five hundred feet". 

For local flight around your towered airport, you just make traffic pattern calls while in the pattern, or if you leave the pattern to go to a practice area, for example, you would make a departing the pattern call.  Then when you return, you would make a call something like "<CallSign> is 10 mile east at three thousand five hundred for landing".  The tower would then tell you the active runway, etc. and you enter the pattern.

Dave

"VFR following" was a bad choice of words , i was rather thinking about pattern :)

just a word about the sayit+ window : i saw that laminar continues to improve integration of UI pluggin . Even if i start getting used to the "win98 style" window above the cockpit panel , it will be very appreciated to have an improvement . I know it's not the first time one requests this feature , but now there is no technical reason to not have an integrated sayit+ window in xplane . So ...

i must admit that, after several tests this week end, Pilot2ATC is not a monster of stability , and i'm a bit surprised that i'm almost alone to complain about this . It has too often freezes (without crashes)  after requests during approach phases ; this time, rather than reloading it, I decide to wait for long minutes for ATC to respond to my requests and indeed, it's recovering itself in activity after long breaks with 0% CPU load in task manager . And there was generally no overload of the CPU charge from xplane during these times .

Perhaps,the cause  it's the excessive utilisation of the sayit+ window (in VFR flight ) which is placed on the same monitor as Xplane , and causing the constant changeover between full screen mode of Xplane and windows mode when i switch to sayit+. 

If it is the reason , this confirms the necessity of a perfect integration of this window in-game , because it's out of question i use xplane in windowed mode (because , among others, of G-Sync )