[simpits-tech] A hard-fought victory!

[David C. Allen]

Matt
WAY TO GO! ! ! ! ! !

David
www.737FlightSim.com


At 01:52 AM 11/17/2012 -0800, you wrote:
>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 mea
>  ns 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
>_______________________________________________
>Simpits-tech mailing list
>Simpits-tech at simpits.org
>http://www.simpits.org/mailman/listinfo/simpits-tech
>To unsubscribe, please see the instructions at the bottom of the 
>above page.  Thanks!