Carenado PC-12

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1625

Well just to pile on, here’s my PIREP. I’m on an Xbox Series X

I flew the PC-12 (or attempted to) from Anchorage, AK to Orlando, FL. (I was going for the Saddle Sore achievement, which I got!! :slight_smile: )
This was the route PANC/25L N0272F210 DCT TED DCT YESKA NCA13 YXY/N0272F230 J515 YQH DCT YOJ/N0273F250 J513 YMM DCT YVC/N0274F270 J513 YQD DCT VBI J538 DLL DCT OBK J84 DNV DCT TTH DCT GQO DCT MCN DCT TAY DCT OCF LEESE3 KMCO/35L

I took off in the morning and everything was fine for around 8 hours, right around DLL the frame rate started dropping (I don’t have a good way to measure the framerate since I’m on Xbox) but it just became extremely slow. Around every 3-4 real life seconds, would tick one second on the plane. I found something interesting that I haven’t seen in the forums (but maybe I missed it). If I switched to the outside camera, everything ran smoothly like normal, if I switched the view back to the cabin it then went back to a slow crawl. I couldn’t take it anymore and ended up landing at KJVL.

The next day I tried to resume the flight, taking off from KJVL and following the same route that I had planned, but within less than two hours it all became very slow again. I quit, restarted everything and resumed the flight this time I didn’t take off from anywhere, I started the flight directly on the air. Same scenario, within less than two hours everything got so slow as to make it unflyable. On every one of those occasions, switching to the outside camera fixed the problem, although it is useless if you actually want to be in the cabin when flying. Every time I went back to the cabin, it would go to crawl mode again.

The common denominator for when it got slow seems to be the following:
Night time
Altitude at or below 10,000 feet asl
Flying on top of densely urban areas
I used the avidyne on all flights.

Then again I did around an hour flight from central Florida to KEYW at night (also started the flight in the air) and everything ran smoothly so… who knows.

Second question. Has anybody tried using the ADF by tuning an NDB? Did it work for you? It worked for me but only when I’m using the backup VOR pointer, to the left of the main tracker (I don’t know the official names, but the one right below the airspeed indicator). If I tried setting the ADF arrow by using the panel right above the avidyne, was very messy. The ADF arrow comes up, it seems to track something… but it is buggy and it doesn’t work, if you use the backup one that one works fine. Anyway, just wanted to know if you’ve experienced the same, or maybe the ADF does work on the main display I just don’t know how to use it.

Hopefully this frame rate issue gets fixed some day, I really love flying this plane, but it is getting painful.

1626

ADF/NDB are notoriously noisy and subject to several inaccuracies. There really isn’t a way to display this on the primary Horizontal Situation Indicator (HSI - under the attitude indicator) in the PC-12, though other displays, like the G1000 will display that there.

The “secondary” gauge to which you’re referring is called a Radio Magnetic Indicator or RMI. This is a combination of an old-school ADF gauge in which the arrow simply points to the relative bearing (degrees difference) from your heading, 000 being where the nose is pointing. The other thing that the RMI is combined with is the directional gyro, so the compass underneath the pointers moves along with your heading (and is usually coupled to a magnetometer, like the HSI, so it doesn’t drift). This gives you not only the relative bearing to/from the station, but the actual present magnetic bearing to/from the station. From that, you can much easier select and fly a particular course, but there isn’t a course selector like a VOR, it’s just reading the gauge and doing the compensations/math in your head.

Example: if you’re flying on a 270° heading and the arrow is pointing to 290, it tells you three things right away: the relative bearing to the station is 20° right of your nose, the magnetic course to the station is 290° and the magnetic course from the station is the reciprocal of that, or 110°. The formula for this is Magnetic Heading (MH) + Relative Bearing (RB) = Magnetic Bearing (MB). You can also watch how fast the arrow moves to discern trends, and even though NDBs rarely have DME, you can actually figure out how far you are from the station if you know your approximate groundspeed. The RMI can also display VORs in the exact same way, each needle usually electable between either VOR1 and ADF or VOR2 and ADF.

But the big trick with any NDB tracking is that if you want to fly to the station and there’s any sort of crosswind, you have to do a bunch of figuring to fly a heading that keeps you on the same course (freezing the needle), otherwise, you’ll “home” to the station, or fly a hook pattern as the wind pushes you off course and you continue to angle toward it, wasting time and gas (and not pointing your nose toward the desired direction in the case of an NDB approach).

1 Like
1627

Yep I figured out the wind correction on NDB is nothing like wind correcting when you are tracking a Radial on a VOR, I was trying to do an NDB approach to Key West and I was ending up not in the right place and I wasn’t sure where the issue was… Until after several NDB/ADF YouTube tutorials only then I saw where the problem was, which you have explained above regarding wind. Thanks for the reply.

There is actually a way to overlay ADF on the HSI (and VOR1, VOR2 or both at the same time for that matter). It just doesn’t work… If you go to the panel just above the Avidyne there are two buttons with arrows on it. One has a single tail (which shows in white on the HSI when you have it active) and the other one has a double tail (which shows in magenta when you activate it). If you press any of those buttons and cycle through them you’ll see that you can overlay into the HSI either VOR1, VOR2 or ADF (and the same for the other button). This is on top of the regular green arrow for VOR navigation that is coupled to the AP when in VLOC mode. So if you play with those buttons you’ll see that you can in fact overlay those arrows on the HSI, VOR1/2 work fine… The ADF who knows what is doing… But as you said, the ADF works fine on the RMI, I just wanted to see if the ADF is broken on the HSI for everyone else or if I just don’t know what I’m doing.

1 Like
1628

Anyone having problem with climbing to FL400 since the last update?

I set cab pressure before taking off, but still get the CAB PRESS warning and stuck on FL350 max and the speed is also abysmal at that point (110KTS).

1629

I might be wrong but to my knowledge the service ceiling of this aircraft is 30000ft

6 Likes
1630

That is correct. 30,000’

1 Like
1631

Is the best method to recover frames is turning off the Avidyne, or have folks found that disabling it (by commenting the line out in the panel.cfg) also helps?

1632

I disabled it by editing the cfg file. No fps issues since.

2 Likes
1633

How to do that? THX!

1634

Navigate to the Carenado PC-12 folder in your Community/official folder (C:\Users[your username]\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Packages\Official\OneStore\carenado-aircraft-pc12\SimObjects\Airplanes\Carenado_PC12\panel)

Find the panel.cfg file and do the following:

1 Like
1635

Simply turning it off does the job for me.

1636

When do you turn it off? I have not been successful doing that… i turn it off and still slows down to a crawl after a while

1637

Hi there to everyone and a big hello from Italy. I really thank you for your help with this a/c which i love. As with Gamatronics, im flying the pc12 with xbox. I noticed the same horrible framerate drop after one hour of touch and goes. I have found the cfg file modification but is not applicable with xbox as you know. I wil try the avdyne turning off procedure…any other possible solution for we poor xbox users :grinning:?

Really thank you

Michael

1638

I turned off the avdyne and managed to fly for a good two hours without issues. on xbox series x.
I haven’t tried it on PC yet.

1639

Same here! Yesterday did some two hours touch and goes without hitches except some minor at the end.
In the meantime I had an email exchange with Carenado support which was very friendly and willing to help. Of course they acknowledge the issue caused by the Avidyne device. So they asked me to test try a flight turning it off from the beginning of the flight. In fact the Avidyne turns on by itself when starting the a/c. I turned it off immediately and did the flight with ease.

But one in flight, I was curious what would happen if I turned the Avidyne on. Well, as i turned it on the simulation froze and was stuck in the same screen. Had to restart the console.

Carenado told me that will fix the Avidyne issue in the next update.

1 Like
1640

One question to PC12 pilots (Xbox/X) using Thrustmaster boeing yoke+throttle quadrant.

How did you manage to assign reverse thrust? In my case I’m using the main throttle lever as PCL of the PC12 which goes to idle but cannot access the reverse throttle zone. Anyone has a solution?

1641

There was a fix posted earlier in the thread to totally disable the Avidyne and prevent fps loss

1642

I use the Neutral point on the throttle axis.

Go into the controller config, find your TQ, and then view the sensitivities screen.

Move your physical throttle lever until it sits at the idle detent. Now adjust the Neutral point so that the white dot on the axis sits slap bang on the centre line. If you move the lever below the idle detent, you should see the white dot move up to the top right above the line. Everywhere below that point is now reverse thrust. No buttons are needed with this method, just the axis.

1643

Oh, that would be great! I will try this as soon as I can.

Thanks for your solution hobanagerik!

1 Like
1644

“Decrease throttle1”
assuming youre using throttle 1 as your throttle axis