[simpits-tech] A hard-fought victory!

[dabigboy at cox.net]

Well it's 3:30am and I know I should be in bed, but......I have FINALLY overcome a hurdle I have been trying to tackle since early September!

I was not happy with all my sim's audio (nav signals, marker beacons, comms, etc) being piped through the main speakers, especially since I will be using headsets. So, I picked up a Collins audio panel over a year ago from a poor Navion that had a hangar fall on it ($10, I love ebay). It's just a basic piece of audio equipment, with a few neat tricks. Of course, each nav signal has its own channel on the audio panel....nav1/2, comm 1/2, ADF, DME, marker beacons, all can be switch to mic/headset, cabin speaker, or simply off. Also, if there is a nav signal coming through and then something comes on one of the comms, the nav signal fades a bit...a nice touch that I wanted to have working in my sim.

The only practical solution, of course, is to completely kill all the nav audio generated by the sim itself (X-Plane in my case), and write my own nav tone software on a completely separate computer. While the programming side of it is actually not too difficult in theory, getting the goods in place to actually make it work has proven quite a mountain to climb. I finally came across a sound library the other night that I was able to successfully install and address each of the five sound cards in my audio PC (an old Dell GX260 with lots of PCI slots). The past couple nights, I have been digging into the custom software itself. And tonight.....SUCCESS! I am getting a "new" Morse code signal from my custom software, on the sound card I select. This means I can wire each card to a channel on the audio panel and get my Morse code (or marker beacon, or whatever else I want) through that channel, and that channel only! Oh, and each "radio" is running in a separate thread, which means any blocking calls to the audio library don't matter...any and all radios can sing away at the same time without any interference or delays. :)

And for a bonus? Well, since I now have TOTAL control over EVERY aspect of the navigational sounds, I am able to lengthen out the Morse tones and their intermediate silences, just like most real navaids do (in order to help us poor non-Morse-reading pilots, I suppose!).  It sounds beeeaaautiful.....I just spent a couple minutes tuning different VORs (with my real Gables NAV control head, oh ya!) and listening to each tone, occasionally checking it against a print-out of Morse codes just to be sure. :)

Matt