What I noticed though with the 738 is that NAV & COM will work fine with the copilot, but not the flaps & gears, also the lights are not being triggered at the right time, or using auto in fact which can give issues if you wanna do things right.
I was missing my ProAtc a lot since MSFS is out. And now it came! And I have already used it a lot. And it is even better, than it was under P3D. I use it with any aircraft and for IFR as well as for VFR. All the anouncements are in time, altitude changes and STAR and approach selections. You also can easely get vectors to final, you need this for VFR. You just have to know, how you make your flightplan. E.g. if you want a SID, you include the last waypoint of the SID in your fpl. The same for the STAR: here the first point. Same with transitions. If you want a low VFR flight, you will have to change the maximum altitude in the aircraft database of ProATC.
This point deserves more attention - multiple voices mixing to create a phrase or sentence is very jarring and itâs like all controllers have multiple personality disorder or something 
I am glad this was brought to my attention. I seriously was about to buy this product. But then I see the way they treat their customers, and Iâm sorry, I deserve better.
I work for Wegmans Food Markets. Iâve worked there for 29 years so far. Robert Wegman in his speech âI Am A Merchantâ said the following:
âI am a merchant, and I have therefore my own philosophy about merchandising: That is, to do something that no one else is doing, and to be able to offer the customer a choice she doesnât have at the moment. This is the only reason for being in business. To my own way of thinking, this is the only way it should be.
âI think that uniqueness gives one an opportunity to profit. If you are doing the same thing that everyone else is doing, your opportunity for a substantial profit is materially reduced because of the price ceiling your competition will impose. Thus, good merchandising resolves itself into rendering a service in such a way as to be difficult for your competitors to emulate. This is the basic premise of the way we at Wegmans operate.â
That philosphy permeates Wegmans. Its why they are rated in the top 100 companies to work for for every year that the list has been made, and why Wegmans is rated as one of the top retailers across many different polls. Customer service is key.
As for the makers of ProATC, Iâm sorry, only after you purchase their product do you see that you have no rights to be treated to respect and service? That simply goes against my very nature now, my very way I think about my customers that I take care of.
Iâll stop right there. I could go on about how horrified I am that a retailer would actually state something like what they did to their customers. But I do know this, I do deserve better. So I will go without purchasing their productâŠ
2 Likes
Reminder: Voice of the Customer complaints go directly to the vendor. 3rdP forums is not where these should be. Thanks!
Whatâs happening with Pro-Atc? Cannot start the program, their forum is down.
I took the plunge and first impression⊠its not straight forward and I couldnât find what I needed. For example i simply wanted to upload a flight plan from MSFS and couldnât do it. Also you have to start the sim and position aircraft at gate before you link the flight session. But then the gates in the Pro ATC flignt plan arent the same as inthe sim. Im sure its just my newness to it ( i hope so)
1 Like
I also took the plunge (but a while back) and my conclusion is âitâs OKâŠbut not greatâ. Yes, there are major issues with gates not being numbered correctly (and taxiways) but that is a sim issue, as itâs a mismatch between the data used for the airports and the latest Navigraph data (which is always up to date). I canât blame ProATC for that.
Loading flight plans is hit and miss as well. I use Simbrief to plan all my IFR flights (forget about ProATC for VFR, it doesnât support it) and sometimes ProATC will barf on a plan that SB has created and sometimes MSFS will randomly change the plan I load when I select a gate to depart from, so I end up with either no ability to use ProATC or it starts vectoring me all over the place as the in-sim FP doesnât match the one that ProATC is using. I would say 90% of the time the SB plan works OK and I have a good link-up.
However, thatâs when the not-so good bits start to irk. The voices changing during a sentence has been mentioned before but surely RNAV canât be just spoke by one person? The taxi directions are non-existent outside of major airports and there is no proper control for airports with a runway where the taxiway joins anywhere but the end. Then there is the occasional loss of contact between ProATC and the sim, so saying or pressing anything doesnât wake it up.
BuuutâŠhaving said all that, in IFR mode it is 10x better than the default ATC and it works with injected AI, so there is some immersion created that is not broken by the default ATC asking me to climb and descend repeatedly (or expecting me to dive to the initial fix from 30k feet). Which is why I still use and enjoy it, despite these foibles.
Mis-matched gates/airport info is solved if using Navigraph AIRAC so everything matches (not sure w/o Navigraph data), and run âmakerwysâ (doesnât work on encrypted Marketplace airports). Below is a short list of my most common âworkaroundsâ.
WARNING: While I do like this product and still use it frequently it has many bugs that require workarounds and the dev support is some of the worst Iâve experienced - been promised a âbig updateâ for months but not even simple bug fix updates since a few initial updates back in August after release. Feels like an abandoned product.
With that little rantâŠhereâs a list some may find useful.
-
Turn off âNotamâ checkboxes when generating simbrief plan. Once I did that I never get âinvalid flight planâ anymore when importing from SB.
-
On final approach when you tune to tower you must âcheck-inâ (e.g. 1 on keyboard) to get final clearance to land.
-
Use âShow Mapâ feature when ATC starts giving weird instructions as it will show what it is expecting. I can usually recover by requesting a âdirect to waypointâ. Sometimes I need to manually tune a frequency to get back on track.
-
Customize ATC voices to remove the ones you donât like (e.g. US-Richard!) that sound robotic or have incomplete phrases. This just takes a lot of experimenting but itâs much better once you figure out which ones need to be disabled.
If you are new to the product youâll have to hunt around for the settings mentioned above and donât bother trying their official support forums, you wonât get much help there
1 Like
Thereâs also the ProATC/SR Users discord at https://discord.gg/FjrfzbMW . You may get help there, but obviously not bug-fixes, as itâs an unofficial discord not affiliated with Pointsoftware.
Even some new workarounds here, thanks!
Well summed up. I purchased it to get much more realistic ATC voice simulation and it delivered on that. And unfortunately Navigraph and MSFS look like are not going to get in sync any time soon that I can see, so it seems the addon is always going to be glitchy. I still canât understand why you simply canât use MSFS plans, you would think that would be a simple alternative. I want software that is trouble free flying + good immersion. I think Iâll hang it up for a while (yes spending around $A80 really smarts, but I had to try it because the voices are so much better that MSFS. So come on MSFS at least lift your game on the ATC voices.
1 Like
I now use PF3 -ATC. There is some setting up to do before use and the voices are not all natural but the level of immersion and functions available on this are excellent.
ProAtcSR is better
1 Like
In what ways? You have tried PF3?
I tried the demo of PF3 for a while and must agree that ProAtcSR is much better in every aspect except support/updates and the fact ProAtcSR does not offer a demo. I did notice that PF3 appears to be on sale for 40% off so for those interested in that itâs a good price. I personally found it overly complicated to setup and the UI is very dated and difficult to use. At least they offer a demo though.
Yes, I bought it before ProATC was released. PF3 is a disaster in the taxi, it does not detect certain holding points on the runway, if you accidentally miss a âtaxi pointâ, ATC does not work anymore until you come back and go through this point, when you reach the holding point sometimes the ATC does not give you contact with the tower, so you have to decide whether to do the flight without ATC (because it will no longer work even if you change the frequency and try to contact the tower) or reset PF3⊠etc.
And when you take off, the same. PF3 doesnât assign you a SID automatically, you must choose and insert it, and you must insert the altitude you want to track at each waypoint and tell ATC where your SID begins and ends, and where your STAR begins and ends (yes, you must also choose the STAR and the destination runway because PF3 doesnât automatically assign it to you based on the weather), which is a lack of immersion.
Like I said, ProATC is much better in many ways. Not perfect, but much better. And if ProATC didnât exist, Iâd buy FSHud, which is also better than PF3.
3 Likes
This is exactly why I gave up on PF3 and switched to FSHud. It felt like you had to spend 30 minutes setting up the flight inn PF3 just to get it to handle the SID and STAR correctly. Drove me nutsâŠ
1 Like
I love PF3. Yes you have to do some set up but the results are great.
As regards SIDs, you donât have to specify and then the program gives you vectors which is excellent.