Voice UNICOM

[Nick Botica]

Hi, apologies if this is not the correct forum.

Have you any intention of adding a voice unicom channel? From my understanding local VATSIM regions can override VATSIM policy. e.g. VATPAC and VATNZ have implemented voice unicom channels. I think I read somewhere that you wouldn't add it because it's not VATSIM policy, just spit balling but I suppose you could add boundaries just for approved regions. I suppose you'd have to have boundaries anyway to determine what voice server it should connect to.

 

Thanks very much for vPilot and your other tools.

[Ross Carlson]

No plans at the moment, but I would definitely add voice UNICOM support if VATSIM adopted it globally.

[Bradley Grafelman]

From my understanding local VATSIM regions can override VATSIM policy

Would love to know where this understanding came from, as mine is exactly the opposite (as is one SUP's, I found, when discussing an unrelated matter).

 

No plans at the moment, but I would definitely add voice UNICOM support if VATSIM adopted it globally.

Hopefully you'll also consider adding an opt-out option for those of us who wouldn't want to put up with all the mindless sh... chatter... that would likely ensue.

Edited January 17, 2015 at 01:04 AM by Guest

[Ross Carlson]

Hopefully you'll also consider adding an opt-out option for those of us who wouldn't want to put up with all the mindless sh... chatter... that would likely ensue.

 

Heh ... good thinking.

[Richard Walsh]

Hopefully you'll also consider adding an opt-out option for those of us who wouldn't want to put up with all the mindless sh... chatter... that would likely ensue.

 

 

+1

[Nick Botica]

From my understanding local VATSIM regions can override VATSIM policy

Would love to know where this understanding came from, as mine is exactly the opposite (as is one SUP's, I found, when discussing an unrelated matter).

Well, it might not be correct. Perhaps I should have said I [Mod - Happy Thoughts]umed...which is a lot different, I know.

 

I [Mod - Happy Thoughts]umed because VATNZ and VATPAC have their own voice room (perhaps this is different to an official voice unicom, as you still have to type into the unicom), it take precedence over vatsim policy. Hmm, I don't want to be stirring anything here.

viewtopic.php?f=58&t=18228

[Ernesto Alvarez 818262]

VATPAC as far as i know was allowed to test it, not override anything

 

the way the current clients work though, plus all the other factors which you can find in the hundreds of other topics on this same issue, wont currently work

 

my proposal would be, at least to give it some form of "control", allow S1's to handle Unicom ground stations, or even OBS controllers that are waiting for training. have them take a quick 10 question exam on reading a metar and traffic reporting. done. Unicom operators are not real controllers as it is, the requirements for the position only require very basic knowledge.

 

at least then it will be a true Unicom, not a CTAF. and you have the added benefit that all clients will be able to use it as it will be manned so the clients will be able to pick it up, you also have the advantage of it being monitored so if something does come up that requires supervisor attention, they can call for it. theirs also the advantage to text pilots as youll have someone monitoring the frequency and can relay the information to them.

[1275389]

I think you make a good point there Ernesto, but rather than any oberver or S1, etc. that takes an exam...they would also have to have some form of a recommendation by an ARTCC/FIR/ACC staff member.

 

Although the feature would be very, very nice...there would be too many other complications that would have to be dealt with.

[Ross Carlson]

I'm not sure that having unicom operators would be an ideal solution for keeping things orderly on the unicom frequencies, for several reasons:

 

1) We obviously wouldn't have 24/7 coverage of every area unicom, so there'd still be vast regions without anyone monitoring the frequency most of the time.

 

2) I'd rather have those people spend their time working towards an ATC certification so that they're opening a real control position.

 

3) These OBS/S1s wouldn't be monitored by any training staff so what's to keep them from abusing the position and trying to actually control the traffic? We already have that problem now, and it seems that adding this position would just make it even more tempting.

 

I personally rarely fly in uncontrolled airspace, so I'm left wondering how big of a problem troublemakers on a voice unicom channel would actually be. FSInn has had a proprietary voice unicom system in place for years ... do we actually get a lot of abusive users on those voice channels? Are we trying to design a solution without a problem?

[Ernesto Alvarez 818262]

definitely a ton of abuse on it, many tend to use it for private chat. thankfully doesnt happen as often on our side of the pond, but if you fly around europe youll definitely run across it being done

 

as far as manning, my idea is definitely not meant for 24/7 coverage or coverage over vast distances. mainly only to be activated like an ATC frequency gets activated, someone comes online for awhile, sets the frequency etc.. advisory only, no actual control. ill leave it to the pilots to .wallop when someone starts going beyond that.

 

range we can leave up to the imagination. i would think a few hundred miles would do, but can probably be customized to fit the area, ARTCC/FIR wide etc..

 

when people move out of that coverage zone or its not manned, reverts back to the CTAF format

[1275389]

Maybe, if this is even possible (which I doubt), when entering into a UNICOM zone with voice capability and connecting to the voice server a message is sent with something like this.

You are now entering into an area where Advisory is voice capable
Please use this frequency as a Traffic Advisory frequency exclusively
This frequency is not meant for any form of private communication and is being monitored
If you have any issue with another pilot or controller, please use ".wallop [issue]" to ... 

 

Of course this would not be what it actually would say...but something similar to this

[Ross Carlson]

as far as manning, my idea is definitely not meant for 24/7 coverage or coverage over vast distances. mainly only to be activated like an ATC frequency gets activated, someone comes online for awhile, sets the frequency etc.. advisory only, no actual control. ill leave it to the pilots to .wallop when someone starts going beyond that.

 

You're saying voice unicom would only be available if there was a person there to monitor it? To me that's still not a solution because then you'd only get voice unicom in a few small areas, and only part time. The vast majority of the world'd airports would still have no voice unicom. I mean, who's really going to want to sit on a unicom channel and give traffic and weather advisories at uncontrolled fields for a few aircraft? The few people that do give it a try will get bored rather quickly. And I'd still rather have those people spending their time working towards a certification to be able to provide real ATC services.

 

I wonder if we could have a tool for SUPs that would show on a map where pilots were using voice unicom. It would allow the SUPs to see where the most voice unicom activity was happening, and they could click a button to listen in and make sure nobody is abusing the channel.

[Ernesto Alvarez 818262]

for our present situation, yep thats pretty much the only way i can think of to get all 4 current clients to do voice, someones gotta have the frequency active for it to join the voice channel. or do like vatpac does via private voice

 

if we try to do it like FSINN, that one does it via a preset list of servers in a text file which can be edited to change the server addresses etc.. i believe the frequency is also editable, although ive never tried to edit the frequency to see if it worked or not

 

heres a sample of whats in the text file

122.800 34.00 -108.00 500 KZAB rw.liveatc.net/UNICOM_KZAB //ALBUQUERQUE UNICOM

122.800 34.00 -84.00 200 KZTL rw.liveatc.net/UNICOM_KZTL //ATLANTA UNICOM

122.800 44.00 -72.00 225 KZBW rw.liveatc.net/UNICOM_KZBW //BOSTON UNICOM

122.800 42.00 -88.00 150 KZAU rw.liveatc.net/UNICOM_KZAU //CHICAGO UNICOM

122.800 42.00 -81.00 200 KZOB rw.liveatc.net/UNICOM_KZOB //CLEVELAND UNICOM

122.800 41.00 -105.00 300 KZDV rw.liveatc.net/UNICOM_KZDV //DENVER UNICOM

122.800 33.00 -99.00 200 KZFW rw.liveatc.net/UNICOM_KZFW //FORT WORTH UNICOM

122.800 20.00 -160.00 2000 KZHN rw.liveatc.net/UNICOM_KZHN //HONOLULU UNICOM

122.800 30.00 -98.00 200 KZHU rw.liveatc.net/UNICOM_KZHU //HOUSTON WEST UNICOM

 

im not sure what the -108.00 500 part is, im [Mod - Happy Thoughts]uming degrees of latt/long and range?

[Brendan Ratchford]

In the real world, 123.45 is abused ALL THE TIME- and sometimes on the CTAF 122.80. In general, 122.80 (and the other UNICOMs) are quite busy, with lots of people stepping on each other announcing positions for different airports.

 

My main support for voice unicom on here- it can be regulated so as to only hear transmissions within a range 20-30nm, and we're all VERY BUSY at low altitudes during approaches, it's detrimental to safety of flight (well, fake safety of flight since this is all pretend) to be typing on a keyboard announcing base/final etc. Also, most people don't even use it anyway.

 

It would bring more VFR flyers online I believe, since CTAF is at the majority of airports around the world.

[Ross Carlson]

im not sure what the -108.00 500 part is, im [Mod - Happy Thoughts]uming degrees of latt/long and range?

 

Yeah, must be the center lat/lon and radius.

 

That list points out a big flaw in FSInn's approach, in that you have a single channel for an entire ARTCC ... that's highly unrealistic since you would hear aircraft from hundreds of miles away. If that were implemented on a larger scale (more than just FSInn users) then I could see that getting quite annoying as more and more pilots were using these frequencies with such a huge range.

 

You're certainly right that the only way to get this to work for ALL legacy clients is to provide a controller to map the frequency to a voice channel, but I personally don't think that is a good solution for reasons I already listed.

 

And in this case, I'd be fine with a solution that only worked for the new clients. It would just be more incentive for users to upgrade. VATSIM has to abandon the old clients at some point if it wants to improve its tech infrastructure, since those clients are no longer developed.

 

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the right way to do this is to implement range-limited voice. Right now, our voice system has no concept of range. Once you are connected to a voice channel, your airplane can be anywhere in the world and you will hear pilots from anywhere else in the world. If we had true range-limited voice, then we could simply do away with the concept of voice channels altogether. Everyone would just have a radio (or radios) that they can tune to any frequency and transmit. It wouldn't matter if there was a controller on that frequency or not, just like the real world. Each station would have a fixed transmitter power setting (again just like the real world) so that we could have two ground controllers both on 121.9 that wouldn't hear each other because their transmitter wattage would be lower than that of e.g. a center controller's. Pilots would also have a fixed transmitter wattage. Pilots could tune to 122.8, or 122.7, or whatever the CTAF/UNICOM frequency is for the airport and talk. (Our existing text comms system works like this already.)

 

Of course this still leaves the issue of dealing with troublemakers, but I think that letting all users know that their usage of the radio is recorded and subject to review could help cut down on abuse and provide a real means for having consequences for poor behavior on a non-ATC-monitored frequency.

 

Obviously this would take a lot of tech development, but I'm really not seeing a way of effectively providing voice unicom otherwise. I've had this same conversation with other developers in the past and it always comes down to "we need range-limited voice."

 

Edit: A possible compromise between the FSInn way and the range-limited voice way is to use the FSInn technique, but with much finer granularity, perhaps even down to the level of individual airports. I.e. pilot clients would have a database of all airports and their CTAF frequency, and the pilot client would tune to a preformatted voice channel URL such as rw.liveatc.net/UNICOM_KMPV when they were in range (say 25 miles?) and tuned into the matching frequency.

 

Edit 2: A variant on the above would be to use much finer granularity in terms of lat/lon, and have the voice channels named after the lat/lon of their center point, such as rw.liveatc.net/UNICOM_44N073W for 44 degrees latitude and -73 degrees longitude. The pilot client, when tuned to 122.8, would connect to the closest such channel. The only downside here is that we'd have to use the same frequency for the entire world or at least for each geographical subdivision, which is not as realistic as having a separate frequency for each airport.

[Nick Botica]

The only war I can think of it working for exisiting clients would be for vatsim to open lots of different positions 24/7 and call them a Unicom. Only you'd have to have slight variations of the frequencies in some areas in the usa of example where one position wouldn't cover the country and the radius zone would have to overlap. But this is not ideal.

 

This is going of topic a bit but is quite interesting....are there technical people that can make upgrades? Vatsim seems to be run like a business so this would be a project and everyone would have to be onboard but it seems like this has been a discussion for a number of years. That vatnz notam was published in 2007. I know you don't make change for change's sake. Is something like this even possible within vatsim?

[Ross Carlson]

Is something like this even possible within vatsim?

 

Sure, we've made updates to our technical infrastructure in the past.

[1275389]

Is there anything that we have (currently in place) that monitors for any form of inappropriate words on text comms?

[Brendan Ratchford]

I wonder how Pilotedge does it- do they use voice unicom?

[Lance Williams]

I wonder how Pilotedge does it- do they use voice unicom?

 

Yes, they have voice unicom, however those that fly on Pilotedge also take it much more seriously and have a better understanding of actual Unicom opps.

 

The "HOW" part of your question is a Keith Smith question.

[David Zhong]

To answer the question about VATPAC: We have defined a protocol for pilots to communicate over voice in uncontrolled airspace (both CTAFs and when no air traffic services are available). Under our policy, pilots are required to also transmit on text when they become aware of the presence of a text pilot.

 

I believe VATNZ has a similar policy, but I cannot speak for them.

 

As far as I am aware, nothing in this policy is contrary to, or in any way overrides, any VATSIM policy or rule. In fact, as a division, we do not have the authority to override a VATSIM policy or rule. I am happy to review the policy if it is found that our policy is contrary to a VATSIM policy.

 

David Zhong

Director Operations

VATPAC

[Bradley Grafelman]

"If anyone who hears this transmission can not receive voice, please advise."

[David Zhong]

Well the idea is that if a text pilot shows up, everyone one will receive his text broadcasts. If he chooses not to broadcast on text (as is his prerogative under the CoC), then he can't really complain that others aren't transmitting on text (which they are not required to do).

 

Anyway, this is probably a topic for another thread if we want to keep going