Ramp start issues
-
having a real pile of trouble with this stuff. not personally. everything works fine for me.
trying to teach it to a group, and one guy in particular is having an extremely specific, extremely persistent problem: his HSD is broke, and the datalink doesn’t work. i’ve walked him through the entire process step-by-step about 5 times, and it’s happened maybe 4/5 times. pretty much confirming it’s not user error. the same process (going along at the same time) works for me. DL and HSD functioning perfectly, TGT STPTs loaded fine. meanwhile his steerpoints never appear even with perfect INS sync, the HSD never loads, and any attempt to XMT steerpoints over DL fails. they also never appear, whether they are nav steerpoints, markpoints created in any fashion, and he can’t see me on the DLINK either.
taught another guy and literally zero problems with same procedure. tested in multiple theaters (korea, BFB 1.1.5) still just as broken
searched all over the place and found nothing, please help.
edit for further info: DL is powered, HSD CNTL shows nothing out of the ordinary, FCR/heading work, and i can see him on DL (so it must be powered) as far as i can tell there are basically zero switches you can hit by accident that would screw this stuff up. plane flies and reacts as you would expect, no ELEC SYS issues whatsoever. everything else seems to be functioning.
-
Well, I’d have to say he’s doing something different that what you all think he is doing. Maybe a simple mis-understanding about a command or switch, but not realizing what is happening.
This result may be a symptom of moving the align knob to nav and back to norm before the align is completed …. see here to determine of the symptom matches: https://www.benchmarksims.org/forum/showthread.php?14835-HSD-not-showing-steerpoints
-
hmm… thanks for the link. is that the solution i see on page 7? push switches before INS align? it worked this time; can’t confirm that it’s because of that though, or just luck? will give it some further testing. thanks.
-
@Cik:
hmm… thanks for the link. is that the solution i see on page 7? ……
I think so …. Hobo (I think) posted something that was a fix. I did not follow the thread really closely as I never had the problem myself. I may not have described it properly above.
The symptom is the same, I think … steerpoints do not appear on the HSD.
-
hmm, at least for me it doesn’t matter if i flip INS ALIGN first or not. works perfectly out of the box.
my buddy got tired of being a guinea pig and went to sleep though; maybe there’s a remnant of the bug still around. we tried replacing the DTC file in case it was corrupted, but no joy; still failed to load with DTE –-> load or without. (in the last mission it worked, but i’m starting to doubt if that’ll be consistent or not; once we’re both awake again and have some time we’ll test to see if INS ALIGN first/second makes any difference or not. the last post in that thread was somewhere in 2013, so the devs may have actually fixed that ‘bug’
maybe we’ve run into a remnant of it, or something else. pretty sure he’s not just pressing the buttons wrong, because if he was and followed the same procedure everytime, it would always be broken.
-
Power avionics BEFORE moving INS knob.
I’m betting your guy is turning the INS to NORM ALIGN before he is flicking the power switches on. He needs to get into the habit of powering first then aligning. I know I did it 3 times before we worked out what was going on. Never had an issue since though.
Get your guy to read through Reddogs Check Lists for start-up too….can’t hurt and he might learn something.
-
A guy in our sqn has the exact same issue. Happened last 3 ramp start MP flights in a row. He keeps saying his ramp start is by the book. I’m still convinced he’s either flipping avionics switches after he set the INS align knob; or he is not aware anymore the str hdd align is not implemented so it only needs one click in the pit to go from off to norm align, so he goes to nav by accident and then goes back to align.
I do one ramp start every week minimal, never had the issue by following the correct procedure. Very doubtful a bug would remain in that part. -
It seems that they would have to be powering INS literally PRIOR to the rest as ever single ramp start I do I set ALL of the avionics power switches to on and INS to align while the engine is spooling up prior to main gen engagement and I have NEVER had this problem. I could see it being a problem if they wait for the main gen to be online and they start with the avionics power panel with the INS as it is the closest switch to them. Make sure he at the minimum is powering FCC and UFC prior to touching the INS switch IF he is waiting for the main gen to be supplying power. Also as people have pointed out if they accidentally go to Nav mode then back to Align have them just shut the INS off and try again as that will also screw things up.
-
set up a live feed and watch do it.
-
Ive tried a few abnormal variations of switch and engine start sequences but always aligns, hsd function normal
-
His DTC isn’t read-only or something weird?
-
Are his avionics in Settings set to ‘Authentic’…or something like that?:)
-
strangely enough, either something corrected itself or avionics first then align seems to have fixed the problem. which is weird; we’ve ramped maybe 5 times since last check-in and it hasn’t failed yet. which is pretty bizarre.
ah well, problem solved. thanks, esp to the guy who linked that thread. would have been lost without it. cheers.
-
