Well, my first 737 Yoke arrived and it is nothing short of a beautiful piece of art!

I highly recommend this to anyone looking for a yoke! It is a great engineered piece, that looks and feels quite real! Tell Ali Matt sent ya if you order one. It may take a few months to get one, but it’s worth the wait!

The finish is smooth and feels great in my hands! The tension is fantastic. It has the stab/trim switches on the left, as well as the a/p disconnect. On the back of each side there is a momentary rocker for keying up your mic/atc. The chart holder looks great and is very well designed. What a great yoke!!!

I did some simple setup in FSUIPC but haven’t flown with it yet. Hopefully tomorrow! The FO is next, sometime this summer!

WOW!

Here are a few quick photos!

The clock is very well built and looks really nice!! The pictures don’t do it justice! When I get power I will post some photos of it illuminated. I will have to order another for the FO side now!

Today I awake an American who’s country has taken out the world’s number one terrorist.

Today is a great day to celebrate!

(Click to download the high quality version of this image)

God Bless the USA by Lee Greenwood:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK9CmR-2y0w

Have to say I was really impressed! Great takeoff and for a first flight ever, a very controlled flight and landing!

Great job DDF!

A lot has changed since Pat’s last flight, but most noticeably is now the full front overhead and the CPFlight EFIS’s/MCP

I got an email from Ali from 737yoke.com that said the 2 yokes I ordered should be shipping by May 1st, 2011. I’ve been patient and he has kept me updated from time to time about the status of the order.

So I look forward to getting them in a couple of weeks and then getting some really good photos up of them.

The multiplayer server is running well on the new fiber connection. Check it out at http://mp.my737sim.com

When I last flew I was running into ILS approach issues with Sim-A. Mark said he couldn’t replicate the issues I’m having. Others like Markus running FS9 aren’t having the issue it seems. (Thanks Markus for putting up the video, I’ll definitely check it out!)

So when the yokes arrive, I’ll put some hours into trying to figure out what is causing the problem. It could be an add-on. So I’ll disable everything, try a flight, go from there. Or I could be doing something wrong in the CDU as well.

Just a good reminder that this hobby now has a wide variety of hardware vendors and software components. All of that can lead to different problems. Don’t give up, take a break, remove some of the complexity and eventually you’ll get your bird flying :)

I lived through the Los Angeles Northridge earthquake in 1994, that was a 6.7, and one of the scariest moments of my life.  I can’t begin to imagine what they felt during this 8.9 quake. And that they have had 70 plus aftershocks nearing what our major quake was in size. Unreal, just unreal. Further, the Tsunami that hit the coastal areas is something out of a horror novel. I took some video late late night from the local news.

Here is some HD video

Sometimes it’s good to save some money :)

I didn’t do any procedures, setup, nothing. Just full throttle takeoff and hard landing to get back on the ground :) The point of the video is just to show the scenery.

Enjoy and check out the FTX scenery products! I’m very impressed! (FYI this airport’s ICAO code is no longer YCSH, it’s YCFS now)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXgaYicxZTo

Click here to view the photos!

They produce FREE aircraft repaints, remodels, sound packages etc for the FS community. Did I mention they are free? And they do a really good job at it.

Anyhow, the main problem with their website has always been, trying to figure out how to use their free stuff! They do a nice job in getting you to which flavor of aircraft you want. From there, you have “Model Packages”, “Base Packages” and “Sounds Packages”… So, how do you get all that into FSX?

Well, I found a post that may explain it all! Click the image below to enlarge:

Basically what it says is…

The Posky 737NG is the easiest plane to download, configure and install in fsx. You really only need to download the fsx model package of your choosing such as no eyebrow with winlets etc. Then find a base package amongst the choices listed that fits the model package. The sound package is a nice addition or search the typical web sites for an alternative sound package.

I’ve dabbled in making a My737Livery, and that “repaint” (Which is all it is) uses the default 737-800 model.

So while this may not be a “how to” per say, it does indeed lead you in the right direction on how to use a FSPro AK Posky aircraft!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TtMZpqd5kI

I’m very honored to announce that My737Sim.com is now volunteering a live streaming feed for LiveATC.net!

I’m in the KLAX area and am currently streaming SOCAL Approach on 124.300, 124.500, 124.900 and 128.500!

Click here to head on over to LiveATC.net to check it out! Or you can listen from the sidebar on the right as well!

http://guides.gamepressure.com/flightsimulatorx/

Discussion: When “too much” software ruins your flights.

Episode Discussion/Notes Here

iTunes: Here

I think it’s a good way to add additional content to my site and help give even more back to all of you in the flight sim community.

Episode: 001

Discussion: SIOC Programming

Episode Discussion/Notes: Here

iTunes: Here

http://www.my737sim.com/sim-photos/

Hope you enjoy!

The thing about SIOC is that no two builders scripts will be a like. Its a programming language, one that I don’t understand much. I pretty much changed things one at a time until everything worked. :) Here’s a video showing the three gauges in action!

Definitely a site you will want to bookmark!

There are a few posts out there about how to get them working. But with the interface card in the Revolution TQ, this was my solution.

Engine Start Lever 1, FSUIPC Buttons & Switches Tab. Control sent when button press “Mixture 1 Lean” / Parameter 0. Control sent when button released “Toggle Master Starter Switch” / Parameter 1

Engine Start Lever 2, FSUIPC Buttons & Switches Tab. Control sent when button press “Mixture 2 Lean” / Parameter 0. Control sent when button released “Toggle Master Starter Switch” / Parameter 2

So then, I fire up mcp.exe from the sima server and it says it can’t find my hardware cpflight mcp. Argh! Config file said COM4, I saw no com4 in device manager. Hmm. Checked the power connector and what do you know, it had slightly come out a little, when I installed the new 3 LED screens. Plugged it in and well a couple hours later, NOW I’m ready to start on SIOC scripts for my new gauges.

Start simple on your troubleshooting. It’s usually the stupid stuff that is the root of the problem.

But I never felt immersed in the sim, so using money I received over the holiday plus some extra I had for the sim, I bought 3 Samsung SyncMaster BX2431′s. These are 24″ 1080p LED flat screens. Super thin. I built a stand from 2×4′s for them to sit on and secured it to the FDS MIP monitor tray. Then I used 2″ industrial strength velcro to secure them to the backs of the upright 2×4′s.

These LED monitors have two HDMI connectors as well as a VGA. As my TH2G is the older “analog” one it’s only VGA. I only had 6 foot cables and some adapters so I tried using those. But after firing up the screens I had serious monitor ghosting. (Where you can see an “after image” of what is on the screen. I knew it was from interference from the adapters that were connecting the various VGA cables together. So back to the electronics store I went and got a good deal on a 50′ VGA cable. That did the trick, the screens are crisp and clear.

Yes I’m back to having the little bezels of the screens, but… the quality is far superior to what I had with the projector. Clouds look amazing! And I can again see the cars driving on the freeways. And finally… I do feel immersed in the sim in it’s current build. So much, that I did almost feel a little “air sick” haha. My end goal is to have 2 more screens that will cover the Captain and First Officer sides, at which point, I’ll start using WideView.

All Videos are here! http://www.aerosoft.com.au/home/Videos.html

But in this case, an SSD is way faster and slowly but surely will start to replace HDDs in computers all together. They are crazy expensive but since they have no moving parts, and are memory, they are way fast.

So I installed one, used Norton Ghost 15 to clone the HDD to the SSD

Watch the video, you will not believe the results! Below the video I describe how I did it.

Click below to read how I did it:

I purchased a Corsair Extreme 128 Gig SSD from Frys. They had a rebate going on so I saved $30 USD on it. This is a 2.5 drive, which is a laptop sized drive, so I also purchased a 2.5 to 3.5 bracket kit that allowed me to mount it in the Dell’s tray. That bracket was $5.00 USD.

Next, I purchased Norton Ghost 15 which is not just a backup program but also lets you clone (copy) one drive to another. Seems pretty simple, or so I thought.

I installed the SSD, connected the power and SATA connectors and booted up the SimPC. Going into Disk Management, I initialized the drive, giving it a partition of 120 gigs and formatted it. The drive showed up then in My Computer as G:

So then I install Norton Ghost and the computer rebooted. After that Norton Ghost ran Live Update and it updated Ghost. Rebooted again.

I then run Ghost and start a Copy, which will copy everything from the hard disk drive over to the solid state drive. Nope, it won’t let me copy. Why? Well it seems Ghost does sector copies, which means the partitions must be the same size. HDD was a 512 gig drive with a what, 460 something gig partition. The SSD had a 120 gig partition so, can’t do it, even with only 100 gigs of data on the HDD. The actual size of the partition must be the same, or larger, on the SSD.

Ok. So what next? Well, I had an extra 160 gig HDD lying around. So first thing I did was put that in, format it, and do a full backup with Ghost from the main HDD (100 gigs) to the Backup HDD. At least that way I don’t lose all my flight sim stuff.

Then I ran a defrag on the main HDD. I pretty much let it run all night and by the time I woke up in the morning, it was done.

Once that was done, after some research, I found Partition Wizard. AMAZING software and home license is FREE! I set all my options I wanted (To partition the 100 gigs of data into a 120 gig’ish partition, and then a 340′ish 2nd partition for the main HDD) and hit Apply.

It stated because I was booted from the drive I wanted to partition, it couldn’t do it right then. But, alas, it say I could reboot and it would do it. Great! I hit reboot and about 2 hours later had my new partitions.

They all showed up in My Computer, and I saw that the main C: was just about out of space. That was correct and so I knew I was good to continue.So the next step was to now again start Norton Ghost and do a Copy of the HDD to the SSD. I started Ghost and per some posts I read on the Norton Ghost Forums, started the copy.

About 1 hour later it said the copy was done. I shut the SimPC down, unplugged the HDD and restarted. This would be the surefire way to make sure that it was booting off the SSD. Well, that started my problems. I couldn’t login properly on the SSD. I shutdown again, and connected only the HDD. Same thing. Login screen came up, but from there I got “Preparing your Desktop” which then ended in a blue screen that let me move the arrow around (not a BSOD) but not do anything from there.

Finally, I found this post on the Ghost Forums that basically says don’t copy from a drive with a drive letter (like C:) to another drive with a drive letter (in my case, G:) Well, it would have been nice to know this before, or at least have Ghost tell me not do do this. By doing so, the drive letters conflict in the registry on the new (destination drive, the SSD in my case) and you get problems. It was a real pain to troubleshoot but I finally got things cleared up and working.

That is when I began doing the time tests with the SSD drive loaded. You see the results in the video. While bootup wasn’t a “whole” lot faster, it was faster. The REAL difference I saw was loading FSX. Holy smokes! That was WAY faster. I’m hoping that the scenery and such in FSX will load much faster while flying. We’ll see as time goes on.

So anyhow, if you get an SSD, also get Norton Ghost and Partition Wizard. Also, read up on Ghost and the OS you use. In my case, I used Vista 64bit and you will find quite a bit of useful information just from Google on it.

It definitely goes to show that as time goes on and prices come down, SSD’s are the wave of the future.

Blue Skies!

Here’s a video another user made of theirs:

http://flightsimtoolbar.com/

Works with Safari, Firefox, IE. (For both PC And Mac!)

Note: This Toolbar / App is part of the Conduit Network. In Safari, it’s not part of the Safari 5 Extensions. If you want to uninstall this (At least, on the Mac) go to Applications / Toolbars /  and you will find the uninstaller there.

Air Display
Instructor Station

aeroSystem737 Avionics by AeroSoft.

There is also a video demo’ing the software here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95AfjeGiC0U

denmark_scenery_fsx_v1_3_partone.zip (99.5 megs)
denmark_scenery_fsx_v1_3_parttwo.zip (98.7 megs)

Thanks Claus for the links!

I tried the demo of FSPassengersX tonight. Great little program that lets you create a virtual airline, pilots, etc and puts virtual passengers in your cockpit. It also does some cabin ambiance, and is a cool overall program.

Anyhow, about 30nm till KLAX my GoFlight MCP crapped out. Unintended emergency! I looked and suddenly I was going about 350 knots. Don’t ask, I pulled the flaps. Whoops. I told you I suck! :)

Read the report below… (Click for larger image)

The new hoplist will start you off in Copenhagen, route you through Europe and you will finally land in Barcelona!

A great flight to do! Thanks again Claus for the recommendation!

So, back in the sim after a 2 month break (due to work and family) I started looking at my pedestal. What did I see? A bunch of useless panels. Not useless from the standpoint of they don’t have anything wired. Useless in that if I wired them up, I’d have no logical use for them. Except to make them do things other than intended.

I have an iPad. I have Air Display. (An app that lets you use your iPad as a monitor, via WiFi) So then it hit me. Hey, I can use the iPad to hold various FSX undocked windows, like for VoxATC and FS2Crew! This would give me a lot more functionality, because lets face it. I have a simulator, that runs off two Windows computers. I have a ton of addon software, many with their own interface. And this would be a great way to bring interactive functionality with this stuff, right to my finger tips in the cockpit!

Well I won’t bore you with the problems I had getting it working. (Which was a DNS related problem) But in short, it didn’t work with the iPad with Air Display because FSX SP2′s dreaded shader requirements saw it as a generic display adapter and wouldn’t start. (It’s been so long since I ran into that problem, I didn’t even think about it happening with a setup like this)

But that didn’t leave me abandoning the idea. I found the same guy on ebay I had bought the 10.4 touch screen from for the lower engine display/EFB on the MIP, and ordered another! Its VGA, so it’ll go on card 1 which means I’ll have 5 screens connected to the FSX PC.

That is ok. Because now, any information window that can be undocked from FSX can go on this screen, as well as anything else really. Since it’s Touch Screen, it’ll work just like the iPad anyhow. Sweet!

So when the new 10.4 touch screen arrives I’ll mount it in the pedestal. I’ll have software/addon functionality like I haven’t had before. Not nearly as cool looking as the panels but hey. Those panels aren’t doing (and may never do) anything anyhow! So whats the point of that heh.

Below, a concept drawing showing the screen, VoxATC, FS2Crew Voice Commander, and the FSHost Client. (That connects to the My737Sim FSHost Multiplayer Server) I could also add default ATC for when doing Missions, etc. Or even Radar Contact! (FYI, the switch in the bottom left is a USB switch box, that changes which PC the bluetooth keyboard/mouse control while in the cockpit)

More to come…

I bought Radar Contact several years ago, and recently got in touch with JD who helped me get it upgraded so I can use in the sim again!

If’ you have ever wanted to use one of the best ATC add-on’s for flight sim, definitely check out Radar Contact!!

FSX uses .dds files, so you have DDS Converter 2, and DTXBmp. Photoshop is a necessity. You may use Abacus’ Repaint V2 maybe. Some people use bitmaps for their textures.

Holy cow, lots of info there! I’ll get better with time, and age. For now, my simple repaint! (I’ll make this available soon in the downloads section if anyone wants it)

View [Larger Image]

View [Larger Image]

View [Larger Image]

Did this happen because in order to move the code to their game studio and can aces, they had to change the title? Or does it mean that this is a “reworked” game, focusing less on simulator and more on just flying around?

This title is LIVE enabled, which makes me believe it’s a online multiplayer shoot em up. Good for dog fighting. Bad for simulation.

We’ll have to wait and see. For now, here’s a teaser video. Which, to me, looks more of a cinematic than actual gameplay.

More at http://www.microsoft.com/games/flight

Visit the MP Server’s website below for all the information.

http://mp.my737sim.com

Blue Skies!

Capt. Riggins

Click the jump for more photos!

Click here to download the high quality versions of these photos!

The backside of the overhead showing the FDS SYS1, and the DB connectors that allow quick disconnect of the panels from the SYS1 without having to disturb the SYS1 at all.

And here are some forward shots of the first panel.

Those Blue LEDs in the bright state are BRIGHT! But, not this bright. The camera just picks up all the light. Sorry.

The 9 blue annunciators that have a dual state are:
2 ENG VALVE CLOSED
2 SPAR VALVE CLOSED
1 VALVE OPEN (Cross Feed)
1 L VALVE OPEN (Wing anti-ice)
1 R VALVE OPEN (Wing anti-ice)
2 COWL VALVE OPEN

(Note, the above is necessary only if you do not buy the FDS overhead panels, as they supply you pre built circuit boards for wiring dual state LED’s)

All Panels Mounted! (Not all DSUS fasteners used yet, until frame is completely mounted)

Hard to see sorry. Took 4 hours to glue all the annunciator tops on.

Now, why Fly Engravity vs FDS? The only reason was due to my budget. Last year I created a budget for this project. I put in roughly $4,000 for an FDS overhead. Well, a couple months or so ago, FDS acquired/joined with/partnered with (chose whatever word fits best) Sim Avionics, a game changer in the glass cockpit and systems logic that runs our sims. It is, funny enough, roughly 1/2 the cost of the FDS overhead to get this software through FDS. Unfortunately, I had to make a choice. Do I get a full FDS overhead? Or do I get an overhead elsewhere, AND Sim Avionics? Well, I want both :) So that’s why I went with Fly Engravity’s overhead. And might I add, yes, I have to do more work, but these are very high quality panels and I’m very happy and pleased with them! They look great and I will do my best to take some great photos!

1. Full 6DOF TrackIR support.
2. Improved “hide mouse cursor” algorithms.
3. Fixed “Acess violation” error when joystick unconnect.

4. It is possble now to change order of cameras in the cameras lists

5. Added “cockpit walls” to VC (limiter for camera movements in VC).
6. You can enable/disable EZCA when SLEW mode is active.
7. You can disable mouse hook “Disable middle mouse button” for issue problem with 3-dh addon which use middle mouse button.

Get it here! http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=34429

Check out the Quarter I placed next to the card for size reference

The old setup below. The 9800GT is on the bottom in this photo.

The NEW setup! The GTX 285 is a monster compared to the 9800GT!! (9800GT on top, middle is 8800 for eicas and bottom is GTX 285) And unlike the 9800GT which requires one aux power connection, the GTX 285 requires TWO extra power connections. (Bottom left) I’m glad I have a 1000 watt power supply!

And now, what about performance? Drum roll. (Set on UNLIMITED) At 10,000 feet getting about 150 FPS!

UPDATED: Here’s another shot! Would YOU want to fly through that?

Click this link to head to AVSIM to read about the UsePools=0 and HIGHMEMFIX=1 tweaks.

Please read the disclaimer and use at your own risk. But if it works, could give you some serious performance increases!