ATC-pie FAQ: Difference between revisions

From FlightGear wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
(v1.7.1)
(v1.8.0)
Line 44: Line 44:


=== Recording ATIS with stand-alone FGCom: no beep is heard after pressing "record". ===
=== Recording ATIS with stand-alone FGCom: no beep is heard after pressing "record". ===
Assuming FGCom is working otherwise (confirm this with an echo test before reading on)...
Assuming FGCom standalone is working (confirm this with an echo test before reading on)...


Due to FGCom design, you may only record an ATIS if the requested frequency is enlisted as recordable on the distant server's "phone book" for the base airport (or the nearest one in CTR mode). The one for <code>fgcom.flightgear.org</code> was compiled a while ago, based on the latest <code>apt.dat</code> at the time. It filtered the frequencies through the two following conditions:
Due to the design of this legacy FGCom variant, you may only record an ATIS if the requested frequency is enlisted as recordable on the distant server's "phone book" for the airport. The one for <code>fgcom.flightgear.org</code> was compiled a while ago, based on the latest <code>apt.dat</code> at the time. It filtered the frequencies through the two following conditions:
# it is of the "recorded" type (row code 50);
# it is of the "recorded" type (row code 50);
# its name contains the uppercase string "ATIS".
# its name contains the uppercase string "ATIS".


Unless you have updated or edited the frequency data yourself, check against the airport <code>.dat</code> file sourced on your side, as it should still be similar. One of the two conditions is probably not met, or the frequency missing all together.
If you are relying on the old data provided by ATC-pie, in other words you have not downloaded new data or edited the frequencies yourself, check against the <code>.dat</code> file extracted in the <code>OUTPUT</code> directory on your side, as it should still be similar to the one on the server's side. One of the two conditions is probably not met, or the frequency missing. NB: The frequencies in the ATIS drop-down list of ATC-pie are matched against the condition (1), but not against the somewhat restrictive condition (2).


NB: The frequencies in the ATIS drop-down list of ATC-pie are matched against the condition (1), but not against the somewhat restrictive condition (2).
In any case, consider switching to the newer FGCom-Mumble plug-in variant. It simulates radio waves, frequencies and ranges, which avoids the phone book problem all together.
 
If frequencies are too much out of sync, the solution will be to switch to the FGCom-Mumble plug-in variant.


=== Tower view is not starting. ===
=== Tower view is not starting. ===
Line 95: Line 93:
* it is reserved for a different aircraft: the boxed strip is linked to a contact that is not the entering aircraft, or the aircraft is linked to a strip different to the one boxed.
* it is reserved for a different aircraft: the boxed strip is linked to a contact that is not the entering aircraft, or the aircraft is linked to a strip different to the one boxed.


Turning the runway occupation monitor off will deactivate all radar warnings regarding runways. If you are interested in the strip boxing and visual runway highlighting system but bothered by the alarm sound, you can mute the sound notification by unticking it in the notification dock pull-down menu.
Turning the runway occupation monitor off will deactivate all radar warnings regarding runways. If you are interested in the strip boxing and visual runway highlighting system but bothered by the alarm sound, you can mute the sound notification by unticking it in the general settings.


== Where is ...? Can I ...? How to ...? ==
== Where is ...? Can I ...? How to ...? ==

Revision as of 21:17, 17 January 2021

This page is a collection of questions asked at least twice about ATC-pie. It is a good idea to search through it before repeating a question on the forum or anywhere.

Things "not working"

Why am I not seeing this aircraft on my radar?

Connected to FGMS: I know it is there: the pilot is sending chat messages and/or is visible on the online live map...

You only see an aircraft on your scopes if a radar contact is established, i.e. if it is visible to the primary radar or if the secondary radar (SSR) picks up a transponder signal from it.

The following cases will therefore prevent you from seeing a connected aircraft:

  • The radars are turned off. Turn on at least a primary radar from the Options menu, or an SSR capability from the Radar tab in the Local settings dialog (any setting other than "none" will pick up contacts).
  • The aircraft is out of radar range. It can be under the radar floor (minimum signal pick-up alt.) or too far out. In the radar settings, check the floor ("SFC" will pick up all signals down to the ground) and horizontal range. Primary and secondary radars share the same range.
  • Its onboard transponder is turned off (and primary is off); see ATC-pie video tutorial 1. You should tell the pilot to switch it on. Otherwise if you accept cheating, you can activate the "radar cheat mode" which will simulate a mode S transponder for all aircraft in horizontal range; see tutorial 3.

Connected pilots do not receive my text messages.

This happens with pre-2017.2 clients if you are using the latest protocol to encode properties. Tick the FGMS system option to "use the legacy protocol" for property encoding. Everybody should be able to read you, but it will come at the expense of network throughput. Tell those pilots to upgrade their client.

FGCom is not working.

First, verify that the FGCom variant selected in the system settings is the one you want to use. Check that your sound is on, your volume loud and your microphone working (system sound monitor picking up a signal). Close all open sessions and open a single ATC-pie instance.

If you have chosen the stand-alone FGCom variant, take the steps below in order:

  1. Echo test
    Start an FGCom configuration test from the System menu. While the test is running, speak in the microphone and check if you can hear yourself back. If so, you may skip directly to step 4.
  2. Path to executable
    Verify the FGCom command entered in the system settings. It should contain an executable system command or a relative or absolute path to an FGCom executable file. If you have FlightGear installed on your machine, you can point to the FGCom executable already available with it. On Linux, the default "fgcom" command usually does the job. Otherwise, download an FGCom stand-alone program from ATC-pie's SourceForge file list. In any case, try the entry from a terminal in the ATC-pie directory to manually check that it runs correctly.
  3. FGCom server status
    The server may temporarily be down, unfortunately even for up to a few days. Check for responses from the server, e.g. with ping fgcom.flightgear.org (adjusting the server name to match the one entered in the settings). FGCom will not work without a responding server.
  4. FGCom subprocess error
    After turning your radio on, check for errors in the logged FGCom output files in the OUTPUT directory.
  5. Port mess-up in your session?
    When creating a new radio box at run time, make sure you choose an available port number for each. Caution when running multiple ATC-pie instances: do not use a port more than once across the system at the same time.

If you have chosen the FGCom-Mumble plug-in:

  1. Plug-in status
    Check that your Mumble client is connected and properly running the FGCom plug-in.
  2. Port setting
    Check that the control port in ATC-pie is set to the one FGCom-Mumble is listening on.
  3. Echo test
    Start an FGCom configuration test from the System menu.

Note that the two variants are not interoperable. Users will only be able to hear and interact with others using the same variant (and server) as their own.

Recording ATIS with stand-alone FGCom: no beep is heard after pressing "record".

Assuming FGCom standalone is working (confirm this with an echo test before reading on)...

Due to the design of this legacy FGCom variant, you may only record an ATIS if the requested frequency is enlisted as recordable on the distant server's "phone book" for the airport. The one for fgcom.flightgear.org was compiled a while ago, based on the latest apt.dat at the time. It filtered the frequencies through the two following conditions:

  1. it is of the "recorded" type (row code 50);
  2. its name contains the uppercase string "ATIS".

If you are relying on the old data provided by ATC-pie, in other words you have not downloaded new data or edited the frequencies yourself, check against the .dat file extracted in the OUTPUT directory on your side, as it should still be similar to the one on the server's side. One of the two conditions is probably not met, or the frequency missing. NB: The frequencies in the ATIS drop-down list of ATC-pie are matched against the condition (1), but not against the somewhat restrictive condition (2).

In any case, consider switching to the newer FGCom-Mumble plug-in variant. It simulates radio waves, frequencies and ranges, which avoids the phone book problem all together.

Tower view is not starting.

Ruling out that FlightGear is not installed at all, your system path settings are probably wrong. From a terminal or a file system navigator, find the right command to start FlightGear and enter it as FlightGear executable from the system settings. Do not add options of any kind; they will be taken care of internally. You may have to enter a FlightGear root directory as well, especially if you have the program files installed somewhere unexpected.

My tower is in the middle of the sea, and aircraft floating/landing on water!

You are missing the FlightGear scenery data for your location, or ATC-pie does not know where it is. If you have downloaded scenery and saved it somewhere, have you tried filling the scenery directory with that location in the system settings? Also check out the Tower viewing feature note in the user guide.

Simulated aircraft appear to dip underground or levitate over taxiways.

Do you have a ground elevation map for the location? Quoting from CONFIG/elev/Notice: "When no elevation map is found for an airport, the field elevation value is used everywhere on the ground. This should be OK for a rough approximation on flat terrain, but ground traffic will not follow any slopes, thus may appear as floating above the ground, or dipping into it."

Read the full notice for instructions on how to build your elevation map. Once you have one or decide that your field is flat enough, the next focus is on the FlightGear aircraft models. Each model has its own coordinate system chosen at developer's discretion. ATC-pie must be given the height difference between each model's origin and the aircraft touch-down point (gear wheels) to position aircraft more accurately. You can do this on a per-model basis with ":height" specifications in CONFIG/acft/icao2fgfs. Read the associated Notice file for more information.

A last possible altitude adjustment is available from the location options: "Altitude adjustment for FlightGear views". It applies the given offset to all traffic rendered by the views.

I cannot connect to my teacher as a student.

Using IPv4 addresses, this typically happens when the teacher is in a local area network behind a router. It is a common setup for home internet, in which the teacher's actual host address is not publicly accessible from outside his private network.

If you know what IPv6 is and that your network configuration will allow it, try using IPv6 addresses. Otherwise, the solution is either:

  • for the teacher to configure his router to forward TCP packets from his router's IP and chosen service port to his local host address;
  • or to create a virtual network, using a third-party VPN service.

What is ...? Why is ...? What value/setting for ...?

What "social name" should I use for the FlightGear/FSD system settings?

Choose any name you would like to be recognised by on the network. In ATC-pie, it will appear in the tool tip over your callsign for connected ATCs who see you. This feature is only social in the sense that it does not refer to an account or to anything technical, but it makes sense as typical ATC callsigns (e.g. "VHHHtwr") remain mostly anonymous. Use this field to identify yourself on the network.

Are the vector headings true or magnetic?

Heading displays in ATC-pie are mostly magnetic so they can be read out to pilots. The only exceptions are for easier human identification, because true North is at the top of the map. For example, navigator and handover list tool tips are true radial headings from the radar position.

Also note: all directions are geodesic, i.e. initial headings to take on a great circle.

What is the purpose of the flat "strip shelf" button in the strip panes?

More than a button, the strip shelf is where you should drop the contacts you release without a handover, e.g. parked traffic shutting down, VFR traffic flying out of your airspace, etc. Clicking on the shelf allows to browse the previously shelved strips, and to recall them, for example if shelved inadvertently.

Why do I keep getting runway incursion alarms?

Because you have the runway occupation monitor turned on (Options menu), while not using your runway boxes. The alarm triggers when the radar detects traffic stepping on a runway in either of the following situations:

  • the runway is active (marked in use) and no strip is boxed for it;
  • it is reserved but there is already traffic on the runway;
  • it is reserved for a different aircraft: the boxed strip is linked to a contact that is not the entering aircraft, or the aircraft is linked to a strip different to the one boxed.

Turning the runway occupation monitor off will deactivate all radar warnings regarding runways. If you are interested in the strip boxing and visual runway highlighting system but bothered by the alarm sound, you can mute the sound notification by unticking it in the general settings.

Where is ...? Can I ...? How to ...?

Can I draw SID and STAR procedures on the radar?

Yes, and virtually anything else, using background images. To learn about those:

  • see the corresponding user guide section;
  • read the CONFIG/bg-img/Notice file;
  • examine the (otherwise useless) packaged KSFO example.

If you have a sector file of the ".sct" format used in VATSIM/IVAO, you should try to import it with the provided drawing extraction tool. It will extract most of the contents for the open location and current map range, including SID/STAR procedures, and translate them to ATC-pie's native drawing format. It is generally the best solution if you know your procedures are included.

  1. Run the "extract drawings from sector file" option (System menu) and select the file to extract from. This generates the following files in the OUTPUT directory:
    • ICAO.lst.extract, a menu file for the generated drawings;
    • bg-ICAO-*, the extracted drawings in the native ATC-pie format;
    • bg-extract.err, a log of the errors detected in your sector file (do not be alarmed as they often contain many).
  2. Import the results:
    • move or copy-paste lines from ICAO.lst.extract to CONFIG/bg-img/ICAO.lst;
    • move the desired drawing files under CONFIG/bg-img, adjusting the paths in the .lst menu as you organise subdirectories.
  3. Post-editing (cleaning)
    ATC-pie does its best to understand the objects in the sector file and to group things together depending on their type. But not everything can be guessed automatically. This last step is where you filter, merge and split objects, rename points, change colours, etc. to your liking.
    Each generated drawing section (point list under a colour) is automatically labelled with the line number where it was sourced from in the sector file so you can easily trace it (@nnn). A tool like sed will help you get rid of all these unwanted suffixes once you have sorted and renamed your objects:
    sed -ri 's/ +@[0-9]+$//' file_to_clean

Tip: You can check your image configuration without restarting the program, by reloading from the System menu or pressing Alt+F12.

NB: ATC-pie does not package or source from sector files directly because their data is not free, and a lot of it is redundant with its own GPL-licensed X-plane source (GPL).

How do I assign SIDs and STARs to aircraft?

This question is asked quite a lot more than it is relevant to a real controller's task...

What people seem to be after when asking this question is a way to organise inbound traffic on arrival, using STARs to manage multiple approach paths. The way to handle this is to stack your inbound strips on racks named after your STARs. Racks are indeed above all meant for efficient traffic sequencing. Every rack represents its own sequence of ordered aircraft, which is perfectly suited to control separate approach paths in parallel. With this technique, placing a strip on a STAR-named rack basically serves as the "assignment" itself. Similarly, runway-specific racks can keep track of separate landing sequences at large airports. Then you can set a colour to each rack for quick identification on the scope. Besides, turning on the approach spacing hints will help you optimise the separation times in the sequence all the way to touchdown.

If you otherwise meant to plan routes before they are flown, you are looking for something you should not be doing. Routes are lists of waypoints and instructions to follow between the two end airfields. Normally pulled straight from properly filed flight plans, routes are printed on strips prior to departure, then modified as the flights progress and passed along with handovers. Standard departure and arrival procedures (SIDs and STARs) can be referred to in those routes, but only by their entry or exit navpoints. They should not contain full procedure names like FUBAR1A since those depend on the active runways and might change any time before flying the corresponding leg. For example, routes ending with a STAR should end with "FUBAR STAR", which means that waypoint FUBAR is an entry point from which a published STAR must be followed. The keyword "STAR" is in fact a mere specification for the last route leg. Similarly, routes of the form "SID DUMMY ..." specify their first leg as a standard departure to the first waypoint DUMMY. "SID" and "STAR" keywords are recognised by ATC-pie and accounted for in the second line of the radar tag when appropriate (see feature note on routes).

One meaningful wish regarding this question is for easy reference in text chat messages. Firstly, using racks in the way suggested above, you can use the $rack alias which is substituted by the name of the rack on which the current strip selection is stacked. Otherwise, if the selected strip's route is found to contain "SID"/"STAR" keywords placed in the first/last route leg specifications, text aliases $wpsid and $wpstar will respectively expand to the first/last en-route waypoints of that route. For example, assuming route "SID DUMMY more route spec FUBAR STAR" in the selection, $wpsid will be replaced with "DUMMY" and $wpstar with "FUBAR". Now if you specifically want to assign a full procedure name like FUBAR1A to a contact and refer to it in a generic text chat message, include a line "sid=FUBAR1A" in your strip comments. It will pop up with the strip mouse-over tooltip, and create a custom $sid alias that will automatically be expanded in your sent messages when that strip is selected.

How to set the transition level?

You do not. You can however set the transition altitude in the location settings if your airport specification file does not already include one.

The transition level displayed in the weather analysis is the lowest flight level that is still above the transition altitude. This does not mean the lowest to be expected in ATC clearances, which may be higher, e.g. for more vertical separation on either side of the transition layer or due to coordination with neighbouring zones and fields.

Can I look up ILS frequencies?

Yes, in the environment info dialog.

Besides, you can create aliases with the local notepad for a quick and integrated way of sending them through text chat, which will be saved when you close ATC-pie. For example, use the following format, one runway per line: ils05=111.11 MHz. See custom text aliases for more.

The navigation/airport data is outdated. How can I update it?

For airport data (taxiways, parking positions, frequencies, etc.), the included source is the last world-wide apt.dat compiled before it became too large to maintain as one huge file. We keep it there because it allows to run ATC-pie anywhere in the world without requiring external data, but its contents grows out of date with time. You should check for more recent sources on the X-plane airport gateway, directly accessible from the System menu, on a per-airport basis. Extract the apt.dat file from the download, rename it after the airport's ICAO code (keeping the extension, e.g. KJFK.dat), and place it in CONFIG/ad (also see the Notice there). Alternatively, for a quick manual touch-up of the included data, you can move and edit extracted files (see OUTPUT/Notice).

For navigation data (navaids, fixes, airways, etc.), the included data is the latest version of each file that was seen released as GPL, which makes some of it date back to 2013! You should provide more recent navigation data, as explained in CONFIG/nav/Notice.

How do I customise the GUI and colours?

To change the radar or strip drawing colours, edit the CONFIG/colours.ini file. Each line specifies the paint colour for an object type, in a typical hex RRGGBB (red-green-blue) format or as an SVG colour keyword name like "white". To customise the main session window, place a Qt stylesheet named main-stylesheet.qss in the CONFIG directory. ATC-pie will apply it to every session window. While you are working on your look and feel, use the reload feature from the "System" menu to avoid restarting after every change (Shift+Alt+F12).

Send us screenshots and share your files if you find a setup looking really cool! :-)

Miscellaneous

What's with the funny name?

ATC-pie is written in Python, and I reckoned that the pyXXX naming habit was becoming a little dull, so I merely switched things around. You can surely do the rest of the math in terms of spelling, and later impact on the logo.

Why is the learning curve so steep? People would use your program more if you did/provided [...]

Often continued with: (you must understand that) this is not VATSIM!

We do have a wish list and will consider any feature or help request. However, though it has a few cheats, ATC-pie has always choosen realism as a criterion for implementation and design, over the mere incentive of converting otherwise happy users of other programs. It is a good thing that different philosophies and work flows are available out there, and there would be much less interest in having them all copy each other, fighting over users instead of understanding that not all of them wish for the same experience. If serious simulation or learning new skills sound like threats to fun for you, you have a perfectly valid reason not to opt for ATC-pie.