COM1 powering on when it's really not
-
(Technical difficulties with this forum and screenshots that won't upload so let's try this again...) The issue I am seeing is that the F28 actually powers up the underlying sim's radio variables as soon as the battery is fired up, irrespective of whether or not the radio itself is powered on or off. Even if the F28's radio switches are dark, MSFS thinks they are on and active, which can cause havoc for other plugins or scripts you have that are reading from those simvars.
Please see the following four screenshots: (The Tomahawk behaves correctly, the F28 does not.)
-
Tomahawk with battery on, audio panel on, transponder and ADF on, yet MSFS ATC window correctly sees that the radio is off because the underlying simvars are still at 0.
-
As soon as I turn on the Tomahawk's SL30, COM1 springs to life and I can talk to ATC. Perfect!
-
F28 totally cold and dark. Nothing is on, MSFS ATC inactive. So far so good.
-
Turn on just the F28's overhead battery switch without turning anything else on and ATC is suddenly active. All F28 LVAR-based radio switches are still off and dark, but the underlying simvars are 1's and MSFS thinks that COM1 is powered up and ready to party. This is the problem. The F28 should not allow me to talk to ATC until after I have hit that MASTER RADIO 1 ON switch.
My issue is in between the time that I first turn on the battery and the time that I have finished turning everything else including the radio switches on. COM1 should be inactive and dormant until that MASTER RADIO is flipped over.
So during my startup sequence I have to manually turn other stuff off, turn on the F28 battery, follow checklists, blah blah, turn MASTER RADIO on, then re-enable my supporting scripts. It is not catastrophic and customers who don't read hidden simvars wouldn't notice, though one could argue they shouldn't be able to get to that ATC menu until the radio switch is on, right?
-
-
Screenshots 3 and 4 here, it won't let me post four in one thread it seems.
-
Additional: yes I have tried pressing the blue VHF2 button, turning the volume to 0 on the audio panel, etc., no effect. The COM STATUS:1, COM TRANSMIT:1, COM RECEIVE:1 vars are all 1 the moment the battery is turned on. I try to disable them and they pop right back on from some hidden HTML event that I can't see.
-
Thank you for reporting this, and for the very detailed feedback. I have been able to replicate this and I have logged all of this on our internal bugs tracker for us to investigate ahead of the next update to the F28.
We will need to check to see if there may have been a reason why we coded it this way (the simulator has some strange quirks with the COM/NAV radios so sometimes we have to add some unconventional code to ensure it all works correctly in normal conditions) but we will see what we can do and hopefully we can improve this logic. We are currently working on a "Version 2" update to the F28 Professional, so will ensure any changes to the COM/NAV radio logic are included in that update.
For reference, the coding for the COM/NAV radios is all located inside the aircraft's WASM files, so there isn't anything that could be edited from an end user's perspective, it would require us to update the code within the WASM files and release an update.
Mark - Just Flight
