Messages

1

Technical Support / Re: Vector doesn't seem to refresh when menu items changed

« on: September 20, 2023, 04:43:22 pm »

Graham. Yes your approach of collapsing the dates seems to work! Bit bizarre but thanks for the tip - it works for me!

2

Technical Support / Vector doesn't seem to refresh when menu items changed

« on: August 31, 2023, 11:22:08 am »

I have used Vector many times and it is a really great tool.

However, using it recently, it seems to not always 'refresh' when I have selected different menu options. eg Sometimes a change in the Vector diagram occurs just with a simple menu selection change (eg changing from 'All' to 'ADS-B'), sometimes nothing happens with a menu change until you press the 'Go' button on the right (which is what I would expect to be the correct behaviour), and sometimes even when you've changed some menu options and then try to click 'Go', it as if the 'Go' button is not activated so nothing happens. Sometimes also the little block of text that shows info about the aircraft being analysed changes to show my aircraft details, with my Hex ID as entered in the box on the LH side, but sometimes it continues to show what appears to be the 'default' aircraft (403BAE), yet it shows flight dates that correspond with my aircraft. As a result I really can't be sure whether what is being displayed in the diagram, actually reflects my chosen menu selections or some 'hybrid' of the default aircraft and other menu options I had previously made! I attach a typical picture. I am using a Mac with Safari browser, but have seen this same behaviour with my i-phone. Any thoughts on how to get this to work well? I am trying to determine how well my PAW and Trig ADS-B out are working.

Many thanks for the great support offered via this forum!

3

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: January 10, 2023, 05:22:15 pm »

Thanks so much for the reply and support, Peter. Interesting that it seems it's the whole Rosetta randomly shutting down (and taking the GPS feed to SD and transponder with it). I'll try that static soak test and then see if I do get any drops in the track file after the kind of duration of that Barton flight, though it has also happened previously much sooner after take off. I'll repost here any results I get. Many thanks. David

4

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: January 09, 2023, 03:20:54 pm »

Peter,

Thanks once again for the reply. I've run some more trials, though now I have to 'jury rig' the set up since the panel is dismantled and I have a small temporary power supply to replace the main battery.

i) Firstly, the radar display problem was indeed my problem on not having the 'TFC' box selected on the device that I now use. It was there originally and then we switched devices. Now displays same traffic as in Traffic page. Definitely 'operator error' here!

ii) Secondly, I followed those links about getting i-phone hotspots to connect and after trying all the various options that people had suggested, managed to get it to work. I think the main trick that made it happen was the one to do with having the i-phone hotspot set-up page actually open and 'live' when PAW was trying to locate it. I think this is an issue for later i-phones, where if you close the hotspot page (even though you've selected the hotspot to be available and visible) it somehow makes it disappear from view for devices such as PAW. Anyway, it connected and more traffic was then definitely visible so it was clearly then doing something through i-grid.

iii) I powered off and then removed the SD card and it all looked very clean but I gave it another clean anyway. Nothing seemed to change but then the gps dropout was an intermittent problem anyway so I'm probably unlikely to see it on a random check. I'll ask Ash about sending another card in case, but we won't really be able to check it all out until the aircraft is back in the air after its winter maintenance (probably April). Alternatively, given that the GPS drop-out affected both the transponder and the SkyDemon display simultaneously, I could just let it run with the aircraft being static, transponder off, but SD on, and see if we get another drop-out flagged up on SD. If I did that would I need to sit and watch the SD, looking for the moment when/if it dropped GPS, or would we be able to see any such drop on later review of a track file (given that there would be no aircraft movement)?

Many thanks for all the help.

David

5

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: January 05, 2023, 10:29:07 pm »

Peter. Thanks very much for the explanation of timings of PAW stopping and GPS stopping which makes more sense now. Yes we did get instant warnings in a banner on SD and a message on the Trig about ‘no position data available’ or something like that.

I took the panel apart today and unmounted the PAW. Even wiggling the power plug quite a bit I could not see any break in the red light by the aerial. I also looked at the screen on my iPad and could not see anything showing loss of voltage.

Although I can’t imagine it is related (unless we’ve got old/faulty software or something - the unit was bought in Aug last year), I would say that we have had some other problems which I mention in case it ‘rings any bells’! When PAW is running and the iPad is connected to it, when you go to the radar screen we see no contacts at all even though plenty are showing up in the traffic page. We have set the range and altitude well beyond where those contacts are but still see nothing. Secondly, I cannot get the PAW to see my iPhone hotspot at all to get the igrid working. This is despite the iPad seeing the hot spot perfectly well. We had seen this problem on the flights in question and found that eventually we would get a hotspot connection to a different iPhone but after a long wait. Today I couldn’t get it to see the hotspot at all, no matter how long I waited. I did try the ‘clear cache’ but that made no difference.

Could these strange things be in any way related to the original problem or indicative of something going on? Clutching at straws probably!!

6

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: January 04, 2023, 03:27:40 pm »

Peter

Happy New Year to you too and thank you for the detailed reply.

Yes I had received a PM from Ash earlier in December and he explained that he and Lee were going to be out of action for a bit but that he hadn't forgotten me!

Thank you for doing the detailed track analysis. I'm a bit confused by the appearance of the Rosetta seeming to shut down a few minutes before the GPS signal goes since surely the GPS signal in question is coming from the Rosetta? Or is there something in the Rosetta that allows it to continue sending its GPS signal to the Trig and Skydemon for a little while after the rest of the Rosetta has shut down? I'm not sure how we would observe that the Rosetta had shut down on its own other than by lack of seeing aircraft contacts on the SD display (though we could also interpret that as there not being any aircraft nearby!) whereas we can easily see the GPS signal going off as it is very clearly notified on both the Skydemon display and the Trig display. The GPS dropout at Thelwell was particularly noticeable and alarming as we were navigating the Manchester LL corridor at the time and acutely aware of the need to be sure of our position!

I don't think the Rosetta is overheating but it is mounted behind the instrument panel so is hard to observe. There is no cabin heat fitted. Besides the PAW, the Charge 4 is also powering an i-pad mini (for SD) and an i-phone (for i-grid). The cable from the Charge 4 to the Rosetta is the one supplied with the Rosetta though the Charge 4 and Rosetta are only mounted about 20cm apart behind the panel so the power cable is coiled up a bit.

I'll take the panel apart to access the Rosetta and try to observe the red light you mention and look for any messages on the PAW home screen. I'll report back on this once I have some news from this.

Many thanks for all the support on this issue. I am so impressed with the support that the PAW team provides!

7

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: December 08, 2022, 08:31:11 pm »

I have finally managed to download the relevant track files from the aircraft, and have created a Dropbox folder for these. I have also added a note to explain the files. Dropbox location is at: 

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0h69itav5xc0p89/AABc0K0P3eHZLoRgQqzyxf0Fa?dl=0


I hope this will be useful. Many thanks for the support. Davi

8

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: December 06, 2022, 02:32:38 pm »

Thanks for the explanation, Alan. I’ll do that as soon as I am back with the aircraft and then set up a Dropbox or something for transfer. Many thanks. David

9

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: December 02, 2022, 06:30:49 pm »

Ok .I hadn’t appreciated that and will need to look up how to do that. Is it somewhere in the PAW website?

10

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: November 30, 2022, 10:10:46 pm »

Lee. Thank you for your help. These are the three most recent gps dropouts. In all these cases Skydemon also lost gps and Trig gave warning message re lost gps.

Henstridge to Sandown
1441 UTC 19 Nov
over Lymington
Just changed from Bournemouth App to Solent Radar. When Solent gave squawk, we put it on standby and on switching back to Alt then had the ‘Warning no ADSB position’ on the Trig. PAW was then turned off and on again but Solent said they could then only see us as a dot, even though Trig was still on Alt. By then we had left CAS so requested to change to Sandown and continue outside CAS changing to squawk 7000.

Sandown - Manchester
1202 UTC 25 Nov
Over Thelwall Viaduct
Changing from Manchester Monitoring Squawk (7366) to Barton (7365). Squawk is 7000 during the time the transponder was down

Error 3: Manchester to Sandown
1516 UTC 25 Nov
SW of Newbury, error occurs on track between Combe and Faccombe
Changing from Brize Squawk (3713) to Solent Squawk (3661)

Aircraft hex iD 403B4C

Hope you can make sense of this and maybe see if PAW was still working (though after the gps dropout PAW was turned off and on again to reboot it.

11

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: November 30, 2022, 10:40:57 am »

Thanks to you both for your ongoing engagement with this. I installed the igrid dongle at the same time as the PAW was first used so it’s never not had it. The problem we see is highly intermittent: it all worked beautifully for several months but failure of the PAW gps input to SD and Trig has happened more frequently recently. I can’t say if these gps output failures also caused the whole PAW to stop working (we were too busy fixing the problem!) but maybe there is a way of looking at flight logs to check that? However we do know for sure that it certainly stopped SD displaying our position and we got the warning on the Trig about loss of gps signal. Should I remove the gps mouse and send it to someone for checking? Many thanks.

12

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: November 29, 2022, 12:33:42 pm »

Thanks for your help, Ian. The only long cable supplied with the PAW was the gps mouse one. Looking at the sockets ( from their open side and with the RJ45 socket on the left side of the unit) we have the following use of the 4x USB sockets: Bottom right: ADSB dongle you describe. Top right: GPS mouse. Bottom left: Serial cable to Trig transponder. Top left: iGrid USB stick. Does that help? Do we need to rearrange them? Thanks. David

13

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: November 28, 2022, 08:51:46 pm »

Thanks Ian. I have the 2022 Rosetta. The two PAW aerials are external and their coax leads are attached to the PAW box by the screw on aerial terminals at one end of the box. The PAW gps mouse aerial plugs into one of the 4 USB sockets on the PAW. Hope that helps!

14

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: November 28, 2022, 05:11:34 pm »

I don’t have a second gps input source to hand at the moment. By ‘ads-b’ dongle do you mean the special usb to serial cable I have from PAW to the Trig?

15

Technical Support / Re: Pilotaware gps stops working

« on: November 25, 2022, 06:58:17 pm »

Latest situation: Today we had three incidences of the PAW gps stopping. The first was in Manchester low level corridor inbound to Barton which was a bit hairy. We didn’t try to restart PAW as it’s an intense bit of airspace but just switched to iPad gps. The second time was just pre take off from Barton. This time we restarted PAW and reconnected it. Later in the day it happened again, this time while we were in contact with Solent radar on our return. This time we had time to restart PAW and the gps came back on and Solent didn’t comment (perhaps because we hadn’t yet entered their zone though we had their clearance).  Seems to be a PAW gps drop-out issue but it is certainly a concern, especially when it happens in LL corridor! Feedback from Trig is that they would expect the Trig to maintain Mode S so were surprised by what happened in the original post.

Any ideas why the gps keeps dropping out and what we can do to avoid it? Thanks!