Spirit X

I like having the easy comms off and learning to use the radios properly in my planes and while I've seen plenty of info on how to use them, I haven't seen any vids discussing general use and radio management. Specifically what I'm wondering is, as most aircraft seem to have at least a UHF radio and a VHF radio, what's the conventional way to use them? I presume that most flights would have one radio set aside to talk to their own flight and that radio would never be re-tuned, while the other would be used to talk to ATC, AWACS, tankers, JTACs etc... For instance, in the Viper I use VHF to speak to my wingmen and then I use UHF for everything else, is this a correct approach?

Thanks. I've been back to the mission using suggestion number 2 three times now and I won the engagement on all three occasions. Getting to 40k and at least mach 1.3 gives me a 60nm AMRAAM shot (as per the advice of Growling Sidewinder's video) and this makes all the difference. As you say, it means THEY are defensive rather than just me, which allows me to re-engage once the initial salvo of R-27s is dealt with. I don't know what an 'F-pole' is but I'll look that up, cheers.

Ah thank you, great vid. I was getting nice and high but I wasn't going FAST! GS explains the importance of using the two together in the video to get max range on the AMRAAMs.

In this particular mission I arrive at waypoint 2 in my Viper and pick up two Flankers to my North at about 80nm. They've got their R-27ER missiles which they seem to fire at around 30-40nm. While I've got a few AMRAAM. So I've tried this a few times now and it always plays out the same. They fire on me at 30-40 nm, I go defensive and while I'm defending the missiles the Flankers move in and clean me up with their IR missiles. I'm not sure what to do here. When they fire on me, I turn away defensive and drop altitude, obviously losing my radar lock in the process, from which point they have me at a severe disadvantage. I'm trying to defend while maintaining and idea of where they are with my RWR but then by the time I've dealt with their long-range R-27s, they're all over me with the short-range IRs and I'm lucky if I can avoid one, let alone 3 or 4 of them. Any advice on this would be great. Can't really think what else I can do to increase my chances of surviving this and actually firing on them.

Thanks, I just found the 'Moving Trigger Zone' option and combining that with your advice did the trick.

I'm quite new but have figured out the basics of using zones and trigger logic but I can't get this particular piece of logic working: I want an AI flight to go to their waypoint 1 and then orbit there. Then if my 'player' unit gets within 3 miles of them, I want them to continue with their flight plan. I've been trying to do it with a trigger zone around their waypoint 1 (where they are orbiting) but it's not working and not sure what I'm doing wrong. Can anyone advise the simplest way of achieving this behaviour?

I'm still a bit of a DCS noob so can't offer any view what may or not be realistic in terms of loft ranges but I have also been playing with it a bit. Mostly using a very similar setup to you, full burn at sea level then start a gentle pull at about 4.5nm to about 30 degrees. The one thing I've noticed is that if I pull a little harder than normal and then settle the plane at 30 degrees before loft, they don't go as far as when I'm actively giving some aft stick DURING release. Not a lot of pull, maybe around 2.5 g, but it seems to give a slightly earlier release and an extra mile or so when I'm still pulling as they pickle.

BUM!

I figured that with the glide slope bug on ACLS approach at the moment, maybe I could fly in on ILS and then activate ACLS when close enough to the carrier but it doesn't work. (I guess because I'm nowhere near centred according to the ACLS glideslope) Just wondered if there was any kind of workaround to use it for the time being?

I've just been reading Chuck's guide on the Tomcat and in his AAR advice he suggests using the stick only for pitch and adjusting lateral movement with little rudder inputs. It felt super weird when I tried it (although I only tried it once), but it made me curious, do any of you actually do this or do you just use the stick for roll?

Good suggestion thanks but at the moment I don't have a HOTAS available so just using an old Cyborg Evo. It just has the one throttle axis and I don't want to start messing with a modifier on that or I imagine that will make landing much more difficult rather than easier.

Ok thanks chaps, useful info.

I don't have a spare axis available for the DLC wheel so I've bound DLC forward and aft to the keyboard. This works fine for using the maneuver flaps during general flight, I press 'aft' for a second or two and the flaps come down and stay there. However, when coming in to land I put my gear down and full flaps down, then I activate the DLC to get the 'lift control' function active. At this point if I press 'aft' (for example), I will gain lift but as soon as I release my 'aft' button, the DLC system returns to neutral and doesn't stay where I've put it....rendering the DLC system useless in this circumstance. Just wondered if there's any solution to this that I haven't thought of so that those of us using DLC on key-binds can still use the DLC properly when landing? Apparently it makes landing a lot easier if you don't need to use the stick for pitch control.

As I don't currently have a proper HOTAS but I do have rudder pedals, I thought it would be good to have my zoom axis on my left toe pedal but it doesn't seem to work the way I thought it would. I set the axis to 'Slider' and I can press the toe pedal to zoom in, that part works fine, but the problem is that when I release the pedal it returns me to fully zoomed out rather than 'normal zoom'. So I thought this would be solved by setting my 'Saturation Y' to 50 but this actually makes no difference. Does anyone know what I should be doing with these settings so that the pedal goes from normal zoom to full zoom and then back to normal on release of toe pedal?

I've been playing for almost a month and starting to feel more comfortable with things but there's one thing I've been wondering about: When you call 'Inbound' and ATC tells you something like, "..turn 290 for 27", how do you know when you've flown 27 miles from that point? I guess maybe there are different ways of doing it depending on the aircraft you're in, but is there a useful generic tip that I'm unaware of that could make this easier? For some reason I often feel like using the F10 map and getting a ruler out is kind of cheating and I like to do as much in-cockpit as possible, so I was wondering what techniques people use to judge these distances after calling inbound.

Ok thanks, I'll give that a go.

Ok, well I'm pretty sure I'm up to date. I've run the updater and it didn't update anything and my version says 2.5.5.41371. So I guess my default cockpit must be the new one but using that pit I find that I cannot tell when a lot of the buttons are on or off, specifically the targeting buttons (turn to target, ground moving target) and the buttons around the edge of the PVI like the Waypoint button. There seems to be no difference on the buttons whether they're lit or not....which is why I sought out Ricardo's mod.

Not sure I know what you mean. I'm a bit of a DCS noob. By 'the new pit' do you mean Ricardo's mod? That is what I'm trying to use, but it seems to work inconsistently for me.

Stable

Good thought but it's not that. The PVI is either like in the first pic or the second pic for the entire mission regardless of orientation of the chopper or weather. For instance, if I play the Ka-50 'Deployment' campaign, it looks like the second pic for every mission and never changes. There are other differences in the pit too, I just picked the most obvious and annoying. It seems that the game loads two different versions of the pit for me and I just cannot figure out why it's doing it.

I recently downloaded Ricardo's HD cockpit mod for the Ka-50 in DCS World and something funky seems to be going on. If I load up, for example, a basic free flight or and Instant Action Cold Start, the PVI looks great: ...BUT..if i go into some of the missions I've downloaded, or Instant Action Shooting Gallery, it looks totally awful and I cannot see what the display is actually showing at all: Does anyone know what on earth is going on here, it's really ruining lots of my missions because I just cannot use the PVI at all!

Hi, This mission is great and I really enjoy the practice but when instructed to locate a chopper on the ground on 1750khz with the ADF, I find that there is no ADF signal at that frequency or anywhere near it. Anyone have any idea what might be going on? I'm fairly experienced so I'm 99.9% confident that I'm using the ADF correctly. Windows 10 running DCS 1.5.6 Thanks for any help you can offer. Would really like to see if I can complete the trial.

I don't think the idea of using non-laser guided bombs on moving targets is 'just luck' or 'trying to put a square peg in a round hole'. The single mission called 'Surrounded' has a JTAC tasking you to take out numerous convoys with CBU-105s. They are IAMs admittedly and not totally dumb but you are only allowed to realease these in CCRP mode (AFAIK) and therefore must use judgement to set your SPI just the right distance ahead of the target convoy according to your chosen HoF. I daresay it takes a lot of practice and I've only pulled it off once or twice so far but surely this must be a common skill for pilots to learn? I mean obviously laser-guided would be preferred but I doubt ED would set up one of the missions like this if it were such a silly idea (or am i just being naive?)

Thanks to all. I've a good idea of what to look for now.

So I'm saving up to invest in a HOTAS Warthog around April (very excited!) and I've been looking around for a good set of pedals to go with it. After finding a couple of old threads, doing some googling and being disappointed to discover that SIMPED are not longer trading, the ones I like the look of at the moment are the Saitek Pro pedals. However, when I read a review of for the HOTAS Warthog it said that if you have Thrustmaster pedals, they will kinda combine with the HOTAS so that games will see the whole set as one complete virtual controller. I was wondering if this a particularly important issue that should lead me to lean towards Thrustmaster? Any recommendations (or stay away warnings) from experienced users would be greatly appreciated. I'm in the UK and, given the choice, I'd like a set with toe brakes. Budget for the pedals is around the £100 mark (about $120 atm I guess). Thanks.