I am on trial with P2Atc but I have to say I am finding it a bit frustrating. I have not yet finished a flight without failed communications and occasional app ceasing to work.

Today's flight to LFPG was fine until being handed off to Paris centre - the co-pilot failed to switch frequency (this had been working fine before) so I did it and called in but the program just kept telling me to change to this frequency to no avail.

I continued the flight ignoring the requests to change to a frequency I was already on then when on final approach a whole load of commands to change to different frequencies and then commands to fly a heading for an approach I was already on, I was also told the frequency I was on was incorrect however the frequency the controller quoted was incorrect.

Clearly something either crashed in the app or went wrong somewhere but it seems to happen a lot which is very frustrating. This flight was a VA monitored flight which went badly wrong at the end due to fiddling with P2ATC to get it back.

Don't get me wrong I want to buy this and to use it on all of my flights but it does seem a bit flaky for me. How can I find out what went wrong.

I should mention that during the flight I noticed I had not set the arrival Star so I did that which didn't seem to work so I followed the instruction to restart P2Atc and resume the flight which seemed fine so maybe this caused the problem. Can you enter a Star enroute? you should be able to change it in the event of changing weather.

I am going to try the flight again without restarting P2atc to see if that was the cause. I realise I am probably at fault.

Any help would be great.

Dave

Edited June 25, 20232 yr by Mishka

When you get told to change to a frequency you are already on, the first thing to try is to put in a different valid frequency in Stby and then Swap frequencies twice and see if the Copilot makes the correct initial contact with Center.  The barrage of commands you got when you were on final likely were stored up in the queue from the time the program thought you were on the wrong frequency.  

If you are making the calls and just letting the copilot change frequencies, then it's possible that there is a speech recognition issue.  If that's the case, then doing the P2A specific Windows Language Training will help tremendously with this.  You access that through the Train Button in the bottom right of the Grammar Help screen.  Be sure and do the training for all the controllers.

As long as you fly the assigned STAR or other procedure ATC assigns, you don't have to enter it into P2A unless you want to see it displayed on the map.  Think of ATC as having its own version of the plan that it uses to give you commands and make decisions, once you File the plan at the start of the flight.  For this reason, you never want to File a plan during a flight unless you are doing the recovery procedure and "starting over".

If you have to restart P2A in mid-flight or want to change the arrival procedures you can:
1.    Disconnect from the SIM
2.    Load a new flight plan with desired procedures, etc.  (Best to be sure the next waypoint is the sam as when you Disconnected so you won't be off course.)
3.    Connect to SIM
4.    File the flight plan
5.    Make initial call to ATC.  Usually this would be “<CallSign> at flight level xxx” or something similar
6.    ATC will give you a squawk code and all should proceed normally after that.
This will work while you are en-route, up until you've received the descent call.  After that, it may or may not work.

If it doesn't seem to work during the descent or arrival, you can usually get restarted by asking the appropriate controller for vectors to an approach at the destination airport.

I would definitely recommend doing the speech training before your next flight as that will drastically improve the program's ability to understand your speech.  If you have a similar flight or want me to look at your last flight to see what went wrong, email your P2A Log file to [email protected].

P2A Log files are located in: 
C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\P2A_200\Logs 
where <UserName> is your PC user name. 
Portions of the path may be hidden by default, so be sure Windows Explorer has Show Hidden Items checked in the View tab.
A new one is created each time you start Pilot2ATC, and is closed when you shut it down. So, if you take the most recent one after you have the error and after you shut down P2A, you should have the correct one.

Dave 
 

 

 

 

 

Thanks Dave,

Very sorry but I should have noted that I am not using my voice as I am so new to it - but only the SayIt option so my voice should not be the problem here.

Dave

Dave,

If you have another flight where this happens, please send me the log file and I'll see if I can see what's going on.  What you describe can occasionally happen due to glitches in the interaction between the aircraft radio and P2A,but should not be happening all the time.

Dave

I am having the same problem. I have change freq in the sim, and the app, but P2ATC is refusing to recognize I have done so, and keeps telling me to change freq.

When you do a frequency change, it must register in the Com area of the main P2A window, with the controller name showing below the frequency.

Occasionally, you might have to Swap the frequencies twice to have it register, but normally it will work the first time.  You can see the assigned frequency in white below the Com area, so be sure that is the frequency selected.

Some aircraft don't allow changing of frequencies from P2A.  Others require you to set an option in their configuration to allow external programs to control the radios.  Most stock aircraft in all the SIMs do work.

There is currently an issue with the latest version of XP12 whereby XP12 sends an invalid frequency code during a swap when the standby frequency is above 136.0. This is an XP12 issue and does not occur with XP11 or any other SIMs

Dave.