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How to have 2 DMEs on a specific aircraft

Postby go3d » Fri Jun 28, 2013 2:54 pm

Hello,

Is there a way to increase the number of available DME radios? While most aircraft in FlightGear have only on DME available, I noticed that the B-777 has 2. Can I edit an aircraft, say the C172, somehow to get 2 DMEs?

Thanks!
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Re: How to have 2 DMEs on a specific aircraft

Postby Johan G » Sun Jun 30, 2013 9:05 pm

Yep, you sure can add instruments to a cockpit. :D

Have a look at the wiki page Howto:Adding instruments to an aircraft and the topic Adding instruments to a cockpit.

The biggest hurdle, at least if you have not taken a look at the file structure of the aircraft and/or inside their files before, is figuring out which files to look for and where to look in them. You should look for xml files. (Keep in mind also that that organisation is up to the individual aircraft developers, so each aircraft can expected to be slightly different in that regard).

A tip I use a lot is to use slightly changed coordinates of a nearby instrument and have a peek in fgrun's (do they use that on Linux as well) aircraft preview to check the instrument placement.
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Re: How to have 2 DMEs on a specific aircraft  

Postby Gijs » Sun Jun 30, 2013 9:15 pm

Hi,

Apart from adding a second model, you'd also want to add a second DME backend. This can be done in your instrumentation.xml file, take a look at 777/Systems/instrumentation.xml for an example.

Cheers,
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Re: How to have 2 DMEs on a specific aircraft

Postby go3d » Mon Jul 01, 2013 2:21 pm

Hello,

Thanks for those 2 hints. Actually, what I am trying to do is just to get a second DME on the functional side, no visual change in the cockpit. It is for a project in which the NAV and DME radios are controlled externally. Since we need the DME HOLD function on both NAV1 and NAV2, one DME radio alone is not enough.

So I tried to duplicate the DME block in the $FG/Aircraft/c172p/Systems/instrumentation.xml file like this:

<dme>
<name>dme</name>
<number>0</number>
</dme>

<dme>
<name>dme</name>
<number>1</number>
</dme>

At first I thought that's all I had to do. I could actually see a dme[1] entry in the properties browser. But when I entered a frequency, I couldn't get any data like range, miles-display, etc. What am I doing wrong?
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Re: How to have 2 DMEs on a specific aircraft

Postby AndersG » Mon Jul 01, 2013 4:13 pm

You might need to set the serviceable property to true/1 for the second DME. They tend to default to false for instruments you add (unfortunately).

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Re: How to have 2 DMEs on a specific aircraft

Postby go3d » Tue Jul 02, 2013 10:25 pm

Yep, that did the trick, thanks!
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