Thursday, June 15, 2017

Nothing's ever simple in the USA

The saga of the HFDL System Table continues.

As of mid June, San Francisco and Riverhead, NY are using table 50, hexadecimal 32.  Everyone else seems to be using table 49, although I haven't checked Barrow, which at one point was still on #48. If you're confused, join the club. This seems like an odd way to operate a radio system in which users fly all over the planet.

Aircraft detect the mismatch and load the appropriate table, asking the ground for it if necessary.  Our programs do no such thing.  It is best to maintain separate backup files for PC-HFDL in a folder outside the one it uses for configs. The appropriate table is often sent to an aircraft, as happened yesterday with #50 from San Francisco. This causes PC-HFDL to overwrite its pchfdl.dat file.