Not all frequencies appearing on the sidebar list

[Maverick Lint 1456501]

Last night when I was doing arriving at boston they were telling me to tune to ground frequencies and towers that were not listed, never had issues with frequencies being listed before, just [Mod - Happy Thoughts]uming a problem with so much ATC activity in one area

[Tim Simpson]

I noticed that myself during a previous FNO. Along with the sutter/pauses that xPilot is causing during events with heavy voice usage, and this sidebar issue, it's clear there is MUCH work to be done with the xPilot client.

 

As a side note, I dumped xPilot for the SWIFT alpha build, and flew into Boston last night. Heavy, heavy traffic. SWIFT did not cause the same issues xPilot is causing, and all worked as advertised. xPilot is a cleaner interface, but I'm sticking to what actually works, vs looks..... Hahahahaha!

 

Lastly, I heard two xplane pilots be queried on frequency about their sim pausing during the FNO.

[Maverick Lint 1456501]

I'm not experiencing any sort of stutter or lag it is just not listing all the frequencies, it is a beta client so more or less just wanted to bring some attention to it so they are aware there is a problem with a large list of frequencies

[Justin Shannon]

Last night when I was doing arriving at boston they were telling me to tune to ground frequencies and towers that were not listed, never had issues with frequencies being listed before, just [Mod - Happy Thoughts]uming a problem with so much ATC activity in one area

Do you remember which frequencies weren’t being displayed? If you still have the respective NetworkLog and PluginLog files, please upload those for me.

[Justin Shannon]

I noticed that myself during a previous FNO. Along with the sutter/pauses that xPilot is causing during events with heavy voice usage, and this sidebar issue, it's clear there is MUCH work to be done with the xPilot client.

 

As a side note, I dumped xPilot for the SWIFT alpha build, and flew into Boston last night. Heavy, heavy traffic. SWIFT did not cause the same issues xPilot is causing, and all worked as advertised. xPilot is a cleaner interface, but I'm sticking to what actually works, vs looks..... Hahahahaha!

 

Lastly, I heard two xplane pilots be queried on frequency about their sim pausing during the FNO.

Doesn’t hurt my feelings if you choose to use swift instead... hahahahahaha.

 

All laughing aside, remember xPilot is a beta client. I work on it on my FREE time, which I haven’t had much of as of late. If developing xPilot paid the bills, you’d see much more development activity.

[Don Desfosse]

With the old voice system, a controller had to "Prime" a frequency in order for it to be active, able to be communicated on, and able to be seen by pilots and other controllers. And if a controller were to end their shift and controllers would combine sectors, the controllers would have to move all of the pilots over to the remaining controller's frequency.

 

With the new AFV system, that's not the case; controllers can simply add the ability to transmit/receive on a frequency for a sector that they are adding/combining. That's more realistic; closer to the way it's done in real life (at least in the USA; I'm not sure how that's done globally, and could change from country to country). Remember, of course, that seeing a list of available frequencies is a VATSIMism; RW pilots don't get to see any such list. In the "old world", pilot could count on seeing the frequency they were just told to switch to in their controller list, and questioning a controller trying to give a handoff if that frequency were not in the pilot's list of available controllers/frequencies. Not so anymore; now a controller who's adopting one or more sectors to make a combined sector can leave the pilots on the adopted sectors' frequencies, and controllers can ask pilots to call a frequency they can't see. The other complexity, which is another nod to added realism, is that we now simulate actual radio transceivers. In combined situations, that could create an issue, unless we use these "invisible" frequencies.

 

I'll give an example. Last night, I was working Boston Center's West Low sector. We had an absolutely insane amount of traffic (it was great! -- or at least almost always great ), and many controllers stayed on for up to and in some cases over 3 hours after the advertised end time to deal with all of the overflow (event scheduled to end at 11pm, but there was plenty of coverage on multiple positions even after 2am). When it started to quiet down, I added the East Low sector, thus controlling almost all of Boston Center's low altitude aircraft. However, if people for example were going to Nantucket (KACK) and were on my frequency, especially as they were on approach into KACK, they would be so far away from my West Low transceivers and low enough that line-of-sight communication could get difficult, or even impossible. It actually happened last night, where a pilot, on the ground at KACK, tried to call me on my West Low frequency; I could not hear him and he could not hear me. He then contacted the High sector frequency, who told him to contact me on the East Low sector frequency, even though he could not see it in his frequency list, and we could then hear each other just fine.

 

Based on what we're learning from the new structure, I'm proposing to the AFV team that any active-but-invisible frequencies can also be seen by the pilots. That may open up a different can of worms that I'm not thinking of right now (need more coffee ), but at least the team can discuss and come up with the best possible solution.

[Robert Shearman Jr]

From what I can remember from the discussions on the AFV beta Discord, it has always been planned that "secondarily opened" frequencies would be visible, but there were a few bugs in that implementation -- so they decided to remove the feature prior to initial release and table it for future updates.

[Tim Simpson]

 

All laughing aside, remember xPilot is a beta client. I work on it on my FREE time, which I haven’t had much of as of late. If developing xPilot paid the bills, you’d see much more development activity.

 

I completely understand that it's a donated side project, and I'm not mocking it. It's just not fair to the controllers during an even to have me pausing in a turn for 5 seconds while they are eeking out every inch of separation during a heavily attended event.

 

When xPilot and the codec matures to the point where the frequency issue is solved, and the stutter/pauses is solved, I will certainly move back to xPilot. Much nicer interface. Very clean and streamlined.

[Maverick Lint 1456501]

Last night when I was doing arriving at boston they were telling me to tune to ground frequencies and towers that were not listed, never had issues with frequencies being listed before, just [Mod - Happy Thoughts]uming a problem with so much ATC activity in one area

Do you remember which frequencies weren’t being displayed? If you still have the respective NetworkLog and PluginLog files, please upload those for me.

I've done another flight since then, the frequencies were the ones with very little activity, Boston east approach and a boston ground frequency, if the log still should hold it let me know and i can try to find it

[Robert Shearman Jr]

See my post above. When one controller is working two frequencies, only the first one shows. The fix for that is on the server side, and once that fix is implemented, xPilot and all other Pilot Clients will show them without any update needed. There's currently no ETA for that. But, it also doesn't come up frequently in the meantime, and the workaround is the same as it is in the real world -- if you switch to a new frequency and can't make contact with anyone, go back to the one you were just on & verify who you were supposed to be handed off to.