On 06/22/2007 04:14 PM, Hans Fugal wrote:
> This is a drop-in replacement for $FG_ROOT/ATC/default.atis
> The file is at http://hans.fugal.net/tmp/default.atis
1) That is a big improvement. Thanks.
2) This is important, for the following reasons among others:
> I fly a lot of general aviation at small airports without ATIS, and
> where there is no controlled airport for miles around. There are two
> frustrations I experience with flightgear in these situations:
>
> 1. The ATC/Frequencies box always says there's nothing within 40 nm.
> But in many cases there *is* an airport with ATIS close enough to
> receive ATIS (but not within 40 nm). Maybe this radius could be
> expanded, at least when nothing else was found? My local area happens
> to be a pathological case: KLRU is 40.7nm from KELP.
>
> 2. A lot of these airports, and almost always one within range no
> matter how remote you get (in the US anyway), have ASOS or AWOS
> (basically, almost everywhere you have a METAR you have either ATIS or
> ASOS/AWOS). They're essentially the same as ATIS, at least in all the
> ways that matter. FlightGear's database has these frequencies, but you
> hear nothing when tuning to them.
>
> The first point is a minor inconvenience, since a good pilot should be
> gathering things like radio frequencies *before* flying. :-) The
> second point makes it hard to get in-sim weather information (without
> "cheating" by looking at the weather scenario METAR) out west.
Agreed.
On 01/03/2007 05:19 PM, Curtis Olson wrote:
>>> I'm coming at this from the perspective of an instrument flying
>>> lesson.
>>
>> And that is a perspective we fully want to support and promote .
I'm hoping someone who has the authority to commit stuff to CVS will
in fact support and promote this.
Listening to ATIS is an important part of real-world flying that
is currently quite badly broken in the CVS version of FGFS.
=================================================
1) The following comments are tangential and must *not* be
construed as being even slightly non-supportive of what Hans
has been doing. Remember the maxim:
"Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
> the more festival-friendly names for airports that existed in the
> old default.atis.
Can you say a few words about what "festival-friendly" means?
I've seen some examples that consist merely of spelling out
abbreviations such as Intl-->International and Rgnl-->Regional.
If that's all there is to it, a simple rule-based approach might
be preferable to hacking the databases. That is, I would suggest
leaving apt.dat alone and implementing some remapping rules in the
nasal code that generates the ATIS/AWOS text.
> doing the right thing would be to parse apt.dat directly
Agreed!
The current file
Airports/apt_loader.cxx
contains the code:
else if ( line_id >= 50 && line_id <= 56 ) {
// frequency entries (ignore)
so it would not be hard to improve on this. Half a day's work
at most.
> On IRC it was suggested that hacking apt.dat would be ill-timed as we
> are waiting for the 850 apt.dat format database to be released.
I don't see how any "timing" issues could stand in the way of doing
the right thing in apt_loader.cxx. The 8.50 format is documented
to be identical to the 8.10 format with respect to ATC frequencies
... so implementing a proper apt.dat parser commutes with transitioning
to the new format.
Also it commutes with whatever "festival-friendly" remapping needs
to be done.
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