16 hours ago, Roman Design said:

Not sure what else to try,

I'm not into scenery design but by chance stumbled over this video of a guy designing a custom ILS at EGLL. There's another quite extensive one, maybe you'll be able to get an idea for your problem (although the autotune feature or finding the ILS in the database is not mentioned in his videos). Maybe you should try contacting ASOBO directly as the majority of developer seems to struggle with the issue. Besides Umberto and FSDT I recently came across the EDDH scenery by sim-wings where the autotune feature is working - maybe you can reach out to them via the Aerosoft forum. Good luck!

47 minutes ago, Tom_L said:

I'm not into scenery design but by chance stumbled over this video of a guy designing a custom ILS at EGLL. There's another quite extensive one, maybe you'll be able to get an idea for your problem (although the autotune feature or finding the ILS in the database is not mentioned in his videos). Maybe you should try contacting ASOBO directly as the majority of developer seems to struggle with the issue. Besides Umberto and FSDT I recently came across the EDDH scenery by sim-wings where the autotune feature is working - maybe you can reach out to them via the Aerosoft forum. Good luck!

Thanks. I'll watch both and will contact Aerosoft with questions. I appreciate your input. Even if the video doesn't answer my questions, from what I see on it right away, it's nice to see the workflow of other developers, such videos didn't exist apparently, just the basic tutorials which are not useful to me really. This is more in-depth.

Edited April 24, 20215 yr by Roman Design

3 hours ago, Farlis said:

But if what Umberto found out about ILS now being magnetic heading instead of true plus magvar, then this needs to be fixed by ASOBO immidiately. 

It will turn into an absolute nightmare when the magnetic dev changes in the coming years.

I don’t know about other counties but in the US, there are two master databases used to provide airport and navaid information. One database, the AIDP, contains digital copies of the airport 5010 records, which are submitted by airport operators to provide information on the airport layout and facilities. In the AIDP, runway headings are indeed listed in degrees true.

But the NASR, which is the FAA database containing technical details regarding navaids (among other things) ILS localizers are listed as magnetic bearings, not true. It makes far more sense to store localizers in the sim as magnetic, because (at least where the FAA is concerned), the government master database already lists localizers in that format, so the master records can be directly imported into the game “as is” without modification.

The system currently used in FSX/P3D is the one that does not make sense, because government database records for localizers which were already in magnetic heading in the first place have to first be converted to true to be stored in scenery BGLs, and then converted back to magnetic for use by in-aircraft avionics. Why do an unnecessary double conversion? 

If variation at a given airport changes significantly, the NASR localizer bearing record will be changed to reflect the new heading.

The listed localizer bearing is only for use on approach charts in any case, because the actual physical direction of a localizer beam in relation to a runway is fixed solely by the position and orientation of the transmit antenna array. It actually has no direct relationship to north at all (true or magnetic). 

Variation changes are not constant everywhere - it depends on geographic location. I live in the northeastern US. Although the magnetic north pole is drifting significantly year by year, (moving to the northwest), the direction of drift is directly away from this  part of the US, so the actual variation change here is very small. Since the year 2000, the variation at my local airport has only changed by 0.2 degrees.

By contrast, at Seattle over the same 20 year period, the variation has changed by almost 4 degrees because of the relative positions of Seattle and the magnetic north pole in relation to the direction of its drift.

Makes sense, Jim.