Hi there. I’ve searched and haven’t been able to find it…
I was wondering if anyone knows a SimConnect variable that will show the status of actual Tx and Rx audio coming across the radio. I did find this one: “A:PILOT TRANSMITTING”, but is there a similar one for receiving? Essentially, I want the equivalent of a “A:PILOT RECEIVING”, or “A:COM RECEIVING:index”. I want to make a light go on when there’s a radio message coming in.
Of course I found the “COM RECEIVE:index” and similar, but that only gives a boolean that indicates if a given COM radio is set to receive or is disabled. It doesn’t give any live info about a current radio transmission. That’s what I’m looking for. Hope that makes sense.
//EDIT// Or, if there’s variables for vPilot/VATSIM that indicate Tx/Rx activity, I’d be happy to get those as well.
Typically, a light does not come on when you are receiving, but it is far more common to have a light indicate when you have keyed the Mic, and you are transmitting.
You can detect this Transmit mode in MSFS, (and in a high accuracy simulation, use it to simulate a higher current draw that is drawn by the Transmitter section of the radio)
For Example: In the WB-SIM C172 classic Enhancement Mod,.
The RX light is to Indicate that the radio has been selected to be an active receiver – Not that it is actually Receiving an audio transmission.
So typically, with COM1 ONLY is “Selected” or COM2 ONLY is “Selected”, or you can have BOTH selected to receive, but in MSFS (for many reasons), you can only have one radio selected for Transmitting on.
In RL many plane allow the Pilot to use one radio, and the Co-Pilots to use the 2nd radio, and either can Transmit, even at the same time on their own assigned radios.
Yeah, I get that’s how it works IRL. Back in the day, I was working on the logic for Tx/Rx select on our Simstrumentation GMA-1347 audio panel and found out how MSFS makes it tricky to deal with. Had to come up with some crazy pretzel logic to try and match the sim’s behavior.
This question came about in the Simstrumentation Discord support channel where a guy wanted to have an indicator that showed Tx/Rx traffic to use with VATSIM/vPilot. I got the Tx part working but the Rx traffic is the part that’s missing. I’m getting the feeling that it just isn’t exposed in the Simconnect API.