Farewell, Norbert

The last weekend was a very sad event ongoing. Norbert, a friend and aviation enthusiast, passed away in May completely unexpected and much too early.

To pay him respect, Austrian virtual organized a group flight from Zürich, where he last lived, back to Vienna on the VATSIM network, where we all met nearly 30 years ago.

Norbert was always an enthusiast for flight simulation. He built with Rene also the first commercial Boeing 737 Simulator in Vienna, called Fly737.

 

Migration to MSFS2024

I finished the migration to MSFS2024 quite fast. I had not expected that.

Nearly all was working instantly. Only the simconnect need to be adopted that programs running on other machines can connect to the MSFS2024 sim again via network.

Mobiflight has been updated and the wet compass needed to be calibrated via Mobiflight again.

With the RTX2080 card I get around 90fps, which is more then enough to fly with Vatsim or Sayintentions.AI network.

Transfer Audio via network with Voicemeeter

During a setup test of SayIntensions.ai I needed to transfer audio from my pc, where the headsets and speakers for ATC are connected, to the main Prosim/MSFS machine, where the Sayintenstion.ai client software is running.

I am using voicemeeter Potato as a donation ware since years on the pc, where the headsets and hand mics are connected to merge all the mics into one Windows useable MIC in setting for vpilot, same goes in the output direction.

Voicemeeter Banana and Potato are coming with a software option called VBAN, this allows to transfer a voice stream via network to another pc, which picks up the stream and sends it directly to a software or an hardware output device.

I used that for two use cases in my cockpit.
– send the GSX Ground communication to the headsets of pilot and FO / speakers in the flightdeck
– send the ATC for Sayintenstions.AI to the client which is running on another machine

This video helped me to understand how VBAN is working

Finally Austria Event – 3 flights in Austria

In this mixed time-lapse video you can review our 2 pilots operations during the finally Austria 2022 event.

  • The first flight took us from Split in Croatia to Vienna in Austria, the hub from the local carrier Austrian
  • The second flight was conducted from Ljubljana in Slovenia to Salzburg in Austria
  • The third flight was flown locally from Graz to Vienna

Please excuse the behavior of the aircraft once flown manually, we discovered a spiking axis assignment on the First Officer Yoke and therefore it sadly interfered with the controls. After the flights we disabled this and the aircraft was flown smoothly.

migration to FS2020

During the last weeks I started working on the FS2020 setup in the flightdeck. First I was very curious about it, but slowly it was getting more positive. Not all functions from the P3Dv5 setup are working at the moment and new versions of SIOC, etc needed to be implemented, but its on a good way.

So I set the road to start the migration process slowly. GSX is still missing and is a valuable keypoint in the the immersion of the whole usage of the sim.

Twitch Streams

As I started lately flying again in the flightdeck I also cought up to the streaming “hype”. As some of you already know my setup, I think I can inspire some of those who are thinking of a homecockpit building project.

If you are interested, jump over in the chat when I am flying. On the sidebar to your right, there is the actual status of the stream.

https://www.twitch.tv/737homecockpit

 

Dual Chronos

Years ago I have built in a small 7“ tablet to the captains Chrono side and during the replacement of the wet compass I moved the screen to the first officer side, but was never satisfied and searched for another solution. Now I found one. I purchased 2 small HDMI screens

which are now fitted in the back of the MIP

and are connected via HDMI to the machines, running now separate instances of the Chrono screens and are fully independent useable.

 

New PC setup

5 years ago I upgraded to a new PC. Now it was time again to do the same

the new machine consists of:

  • i5-10600KF
  • 32GB RAM
  • Gigabyte Z490 Gaming X Motherboard
  • 480GB SSD for the Win10 OS
  • 1TB WD Blue NVMe SSD for P3Dv5
  • GTX1080 from the old PC to upgrade in the near future to an RTX2080

The “old” PC will replace the vpilot PC and the streaming PC, if it is capable of doing both.

I also changed the other PCs around and streamlined the configuration and therefore reduced 1 machine.

Building a 737-800 Homecockpit [OE-LNJ]