Hi,
There is a small history behind this question, scattered over channels and years, but as far as I can tell it is not resolved, or no recommendations followed.
ATC clients rely on transponders to do their job, and read into the following propoerties:
- 1500: int 'instrumentation/transponder/transmitted-id'
- 1501: int 'instrumentation/transponder/altitude'
- 1502: bool 'instrumentation/transponder/ident'
- 1503: int 'instrumentation/transponder/inputs/mode'
Problem is, prop 1503 never reflects any cockpit setting. It is mostly fixed to a value 1 or 2, and never changing. ACFT dev's mostly update plane-specific knob properties but seem not to bother with what eventually ends up in MP traffic. As I said, this problem has been around for years, and I have been relying on other XPDR-related prop's to decide on how to deal with the planes, mostly using what seemed like common (though undocumented---I suspect mere copy-paste propagation) practice among dummy property values. E.g. rules like "if 1501 is < -999, consider this mode A" or "if 1500 is < 0, consider XPDR off". Basically, discarding 1503 since it was consistently UN-reliable.
The problem with this non-solution is that some planes are still not covered (most 777s do not ever fill an altitude), and modes C and C+S are technically undistinguishable. So I would love to clear that up if possible.
Questions:
1. I remember talking about this with Stuart at the FSweekend and he pulled up a one-line code comment from somewhere containing a short spec of what the values for 1503 should be. Anybody knows what that source might be, and whether it should actually serve as the spec we should all follow?
2. Should we go round all aircraft to correct this? Is this scriptable?
Cheers
[EDIT: syntactic mistake]