Talk:FGCom (before 3.0)

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Revision as of 12:32, 25 November 2007 by Willie (talk | contribs)
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FGCOM - feature request

Well thanks to some very hard work by some talented people and a clueless tester FGCOM has moved ahead a great deal in the past few days. Now it is cross distro and possibly even POSIX compliant, we have a possible Openal based system which should simplify things a lot and tie in well with existing work. Work goes ahead on implementing a PTT switch and appropriate muting.

However we still have a little way to go to realistically emulate VHF aviation comms. Because we are mapping frequencies onto conference call numbers (lets leave the range aspect alone for now), two or more stations can talk at once. This isn't how it works in Real Life, only one aircraft or ATC facility can talk at a time and if someone insists on talking or the PTT switch becomes jammed on, then there is not a lot that can be done about it. Nobody else can use that frequency until the pilot stops talking or his radio is switched off. There are good reasons for this, not least the dreadful sound quality of the original radios, the sometimes life-or-death nature of the information being transferred meant that having only one pilot or controller talking while everybody else listened was A Good Thing.

This is a feature request because, much as I'd like to, I can't deliver the necessary code.

I'd like to see this highly able asterisk system crippled so that only one caller can speak at a time - To get round possible abuse of this, any caller is only allowed a max of say 30 secs (more than enough for any realistic aviation comms) before their call is terminated and they have to rejoin the conversation (come back up on channel)

Is any of this feasible?

--Willie 06:51, 25 November 2007 (EST)

Voice Quality --its too good and its not good enough ;-)

At present we are having lots of echo testing. This may be down to extremely cheap, oversensitive mics at my end but in general it just doesn't sound like the real thing. We have distortion but its the wrong sort. Not sure how to sort this but a first attempt would be a tight narrow pass filter and possibly mixed with a white noise source to give that "radio" sound. Could get fancy and add a definite "click" as the PTT is pressed at the beginning of a call and also when it is released.

--Willie 06:51, 25 November 2007 (EST)