Hi, let me chime in here with a personal note, hoping it's not offending anybody.
Although I like having accurate and detailed computation of our real-world simulation, I'm not really a friend of the radio propagation code with the level of detail given. Please let me explain why that is the case: The radio stations used for aviation purpose certainly follow the same physical laws as any other radio station does. However, their performance have to adhere to some specific rules, mostly set up by the ICAO. Service volumes is on of these rules, a straight ILS final track is another etc. If real life's environment disturbes the performance of the radio stations, the operator has to work hard to override these environmental impacts. As we usually do not have any detailed information about how the radio station is set up (and I doubt, we will ever get those), it's close to impossible to correctly model radio probagation of a specific station. Adding envirionmental factors besides terrain and terrain cover and the factors of aircraft installations will result in a wide range of uncertainty, spoiling all the detailed computation of the radio signal propagation. As a pilot, I am usually just interested in the factor, if I am within the service volume of a radio station. If so, I'd expect a clear and correct indication, probably with the well-known system errors applied. If I am outside the service volume, the systems may show "something", but I do not really care about what exactly an ILS indicator (as an example) is showing. From real life experience, I can say that barely two stations behave the same if you are outside their published range. Sidelobes of a localizer may appear at on site and may not at another site. False glideslopes appear here but do not show up somewhere else. It depends heavily on the local setup of the base equipment (and to some degree on aircraft installations). However, I have seen the shoreline effect of ADF stations deflection my ADF needle heavily and I have seen effects of nearby thunderstorms and lightning on the instruments. I'd love to see these effects modeled. That said, I think doing realtime radio signal propagations is much more that we need and much more than we want. At least unless we are multi-threading and have a spare CPU for those computations. This is certainly just my personal point of view. Greetings, Torsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
