Fine tuning FS

During the flight I mentioned in my last entry, I realised that I had forgotten to install and setup some stuff. So I installed them today. These were:

  • Service Pack 3 for the Flight 1 ATR 72
  • Latest navitational database for the ATR 72, available from navigraph.com

I also had to set up my microphone. It wasn’t easy. Windows 7 detects two microphones for some reason. I had to disable the first one in the list. Furthermore I had to increase the volume to 100% and boost to +20.0 dB (66%). We tested the microphone with a fellow pilot so now it should be ok. 🙂 By the way, it was the same pilot as yesterday, let’s call him BCY007 Lotfi 😉

The engines were too loud, so I changed the sound settings as well. First in the ATR 72 configurator. Ambient sounds are set to 50%, everything else is set to 90%. Unfortunately, I cannot hear some less important sounds using these settings, but I cannot set the ambient sounds higher to 50%, otherwise I get a terrible noise in the cockpit.

I have also changed the Flight Simulator sound settings as follows: 2, 30, 20, 10, 80, 80. As you see I have set the engines to very low. Now it’s fine. I can still hear them so I notice how the engines react on changing the throttle.

Finally I did a short flight from EIDW (Dublin) to EINN (Shannon), and everything went fine.

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Fokker F50 and DAAG sceenery

Yesterday I have installed a Fokker F50 for FS2004. It was made by DreamWings Design, and it contains a CityJet livery by Mathieu Vos. It is available from flightsim.com: http://www.flightsim.com/kdl.php?fid=139789

Installation is straightforward, just copy the extracted directory in the Aircraft directory of FS2004. There is also a panel for the F50 from the Fokker Panel Project, but I haven’t installed it yet.

Today I did a flight with a fellow pilot from CityJet VA from DTTA (Tunis) to DAAG (Algiers). There is a very nice sceenery available for DAAG that I installed before the flight. Just unrar to Addon Sceeneries, add as usually, and it works. Available from http://riadg.free.fr/

As the DAAG sceenery is in a rar file, I had to install winrar as well. However, I set it to be the default application for rar files only. Windows 7 can handle zip files, so I’m glad I don’t have to use winzip. And I will use winrar only when really necessary.

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Windows 7

My Windows XP kept crashing when I was running Microsoft Flight Simulator, so I decided to upgrade to Windows 7. I just had to find some space on the disk, insert the DVD and the rest was straightforward.

For those who know me it might be surpising that I use Windows. Well I do, but only for Flight Simulator. 😀


As a future reference, here is a list of things I installed or configured:

  • Windows 7 – quite simple procedure
  • Firefox – musthave
    • flash plugin – open a page with flash, and click on the popup to install
    • flashblock – I quickly realised the need when I started browsing
    • adblock pro – see above
  • bluetooth headset – works out of the box
  • Flight Simulator 2004 – takes some time
    • realism settings – display flying tips: off
    • realism settings – autorudder: off
    • resolution – a bit bigger than 640×480
  • Joystick – works out of the box, only a calibration was neeed
  • Flight1 ATR 72-500 – my favourite aircraft so far
    • text-o-matic – to install some more textures
    • F1 view utility – I didn’t find it that useful yet
    • serivce pack 3 – TODO
  • IvAp – first install wasn’t successful, but the second one was OK
      • config – populate TCAS: on
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Blog is back

Finally I had time to fix my blog. When I upgraded my system and did a database backup, I did it in a wrong way. So I couldn’t do a straightforward recovery, I had to do it manually. And it take so long. Well, it only took a few hours, but I never found the time for it until now. But now it’s back, time to share my latest adventures 😉

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IPv6

I thought it was time to move to IPv6. And I did:

robi@akari:~$ ping6 -c 1 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.google.com(2001:4860:0:1001::68) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:4860:0:1001::68: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=237 ms

--- ipv6.google.com ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 237.123/237.123/237.123/0.000 ms


I configured the router using this document: OpenWrt IPv6 howto.

No configuration were needed on the client side. We have linuces: Ubuntu 8.04 and Debian lenny, and they work out of the box.

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