One step forward, one step back

Gianluca emailed me today saying he will be in town in a couple of weeks. It's been about a year since he and his lovely F/O visited. To be honest, there's not a lot of progress to show in the last 12 months - I was shamed into getting back on it today.

There were some things I wanted to straighten out so here's the punch list for today:

Get the upper EICAS screen working
Fix the annoying connect/disconnect sound the TQ makes all the time
Sort out the terrain display in the nav display
Fix voltage drop on my CPFlight units

EICAS
Easy enough. Plugged the second monitor into my new Dell system and extended the desktop over the 2 screens. Created a copy of the ProSim display folder and added a new shortcut to the desktop called EICAS. Once I had the ProSim display situated, I clicked on the "fullscreen" option and it held its place on the second, 10" monitor. Fired up the other display and all was well. Cool. I can finally see what the engines are doing and how much fuel I have left. Handy.

Connect/Disconnect
A "feature" of the wonderful Revolution Simproducts TQ. I followed their fix it guide (you can find it here), first by changing the power options in Windows 7 (made no difference) then by adding a powered USB hub. Doing this meant I had to change the SIOC ini file but I'm wise to this now! Still no difference although once I got the sim fired up, the problem seemed to go away.

Terrain Display
This is a great option in Prosim737. I don't believe they have it Project Magenta and if they do, it's probably in that annoyingly named module called Wazzup. I'll tell you what's up, the thing isn't documented I could never get it to work. With Prosim though, it's a breeze.

First check your cockpit settings in the instructor station:

Make sure the "vertical situation display" option is checked. Also, install the terrain data files on the computer that has the cockpit displays running (more on that here). While I was in this screen, I noticed a setting for weight in kg or lbs. In my previous post I mentioned I preferred pounds, so here is where you set it. FMC works like a champ now.

Here are some examples of the terrain display. I'm making an approach to KMFR (Medford, Oregon), ILS14, coming in from the south. The area is mountainous and you can see where my descent is taking me and at what altitude I'll intercept waypoint KUSHI at the current rate:

In this shot, I've made the base leg and I'm heading to waypoint SAMIE. If I continue on this heading and descent rate, I'll clip the top off a mountain - not good:

Next shot you can see the remaining waypoints and the runway. I better get down sharpish - you can see I'm in level flight and I need to get the nose down to intercept the glideslope:

Last shot I'm on short final and more or less on the glideslope. See how the mountains on the other side of the runway are highlighted in yellow? If I mess up the landing and go around, I better start climbing in a hurry:

Fix voltage drop on CPFlight modules
And this is where we take a step backwards...

I've been in touch with CPFlight since I noticed that the radio displays would flicker when the solenoids that release the fire handles would kick in, during fire drill tests. They recommended I add a second power supply, one to the MIP card and keep the existing one plugged into the MIP. This I did and moved the jumper on the board to the "I" position so that it would take its power internally.

It didn't work. Unplugged the power to the board and reverted to the "E" for external setting. Nothing. The MIP is working but the board has quit on me. This is the second one that has died - I await further instructions from Italy before making any more improvements to the sim. Replacing the board is a pain since it requires rewiring every connection. Hope that isn't what's required.