carbolicus

To any British here who have ever watched Phantoms in the 70's and 80's flying low-level in the Lake District, the CWG map provides a passable substitute!

Many thanks again for this!

Thanks both!

The ILS frequencies for both runway directions at Hahn are 112.00 and higher. They hence don’t work - the A10C ILS frequency range cannot be set above 111.95, and although you can set 112.00 in the F4E it won’t pick it up. Having said that, must just say that the CWG map is excellent; looks fantastic and performs very well indeed in VR!

This looks great and I’ll be downloading as soon as I get some downtime for a DCS session - many thanks!

I really recommend this map. Performance for me with a 3080ti is better than on any other map I have, it looks excellent, and the potential for missions and campaigns which can use much of the aircraft and kit we have in DCS is enormous. Hopefully Ugra will do what some other map-makers don’t, which is keep on top of it and update it frequently. I like Sinai a lot too, but updates are far too few and far between.

Yes, correct.

Set weather to clear skies and add some mist/haze, and you get a really good desert feel.

I wanted to recreate the cloudless skies and heat/dust haze I remember from living in a semi-desert area, but the dust setting doesn’t look authentic. But with fog set to a visibility of between 1 and 2 miles (8,000 to 10,000 feet or so) and a thickness of just a few hundred feet, you get a good dusty/hazy effect at ground level. Don’t forget that the thickness is from sea level, so e.g. if the ground is 3000 feet above sea level then you need to set thickness to 3,500 feet in order to get a fog layer just 500 feet above ground. This setting is not so good for screenshots at altitude as you get an unrealistic sharp line where the fog stops, so for those screenshots I like to put the thickness right up but also increase the visibility. Takes a bit of fiddling to get the effect you want - but the new fog feature generally looks very good!

Phantoms over the Nile Delta, 1970...

Phantoms over Sinai...

Ghosts of Atonement...

Storm - You must have some kind of PC issue. For me VR performance is excellent, and my system is not top of the range. Sinai is a very good-looking and promising map.

I seem to have acquired an adware virus which repeatedly displays pop-up adverts. Whilst I wait for a PC support visit to cleanse my PC, can anyone let me know any way I can make sure these pop-up boxes don’t appear in the centre of my VR view? I can live with them in 2D until the problem’s dealt with, but you can’t fly an ILS approach in VR with a second-hand car advert centred on your instrument panel!

Can anyone tell me where the H-6J template can be found? I’m trying to make a skin for it, and I’m getting tired of trying to work out which bits are where. Thanks!

Yes, Sinai is potentially a fantastic map, it’s already pretty good and now my favourite. OnReTech, despite being slow to update it, have made something with masses of potential and I have made some atmospheric Six Day and Yom Kippur War missions, and downloaded others. If they can expand it as suggested above it will be even better. I hope they will in future update it more frequently - little and often is maybe the best way to keep people interested.

Thanks very much, appreciate your replies, that’s reassuring for now!

I have a Reverb G2 which I like enormously, and I would like to keep using it as long as possible, which means until Windows 11 dumps WMR. I have heard that the end of WMR comes with the 24H2 update, and that this will not become compulsory until late 2025 - can anybody confirm this? Also, is it guaranteed that WMR will still work with the 23H2 updates - I have one pending to download but I’m nervous about it! Thanks!

Of all the DCS maps I have Sinai is now the one I like best. Yes it needs a lot more work, but I think it looks excellent. To me, built up areas look better than those on the Syria map (which is also excellent it has to be said). I find performance pretty good too. Also, having flown quite a bit IRL over semi-desert terrain I find Sinai particularly convincing. It’s a very promising map.

The Heatblur Phantom is absolutely fantastic and is now more or less the only DCS plane I fly. And Jester adds so much to the to the experience; I’m all for him. Gotta love a guy who said my last landing was smoother than Meg Ryan’s bottom… (or maybe I mis-heard that…)

Just not sure about you saying that the HSI is ‘…far less accurate due to drift’? I’m not an expert on the Phantom nor any fast jet, but surely by the time the Phantom came along, HSIs in sophisticated aircraft such as fast jets did not drift and were driven by Radio Magnetic Indicators or something similarly advanced? It’s just that gyro drift is a phenomenon you find in relatively simple gyro-driven instruments such as Direction Indicators - any private pilot knows that every 15 minutes or so you need to hold the Cessna or whatever steady and re-set the DI by the magnetic compass. With the Phantom I’ve flown for over an hour using TACANS and when intercepting the final approach course for an ILS approach the TACAN is always aligned with the ILS localiser.

I believe he was flying the RAF Hawk trainer, and he certainly didn’t mean that he religiously left the control column untouched and flew the approach and flare by pitch trim clicks! I think he just meant that he made slight adjustments via trim clicks on the approach rather than applying stick pressure. This of course is not how you are taught to do it in primary flight training, but it seemed to be acceptable to him in that aeroplane. It doesn’t work well with our Heatblur Phantom!

Absolutely agree with this. The Phantom module is a fantastic piece of work, and I want the real deal. There are other flight sim options if you want to play a 'game'! I have just completed a long IFR cross-country (using TACANs) and ILS landing in the Phantom at night and in bad weather, and it was hugely satisfying. The concentration and instrument-scan techniques are as crucial as in real life, especially when hand-flying the ILS. Yes, trim-wise it's more fiddly than commercial aircraft and requires more frequent attention, but that's realism, which is what we want isn't it? As has also been pointed out here, proper trimming techniques help a lot - you shouldn't use the trim as a primary pitch control, you should use the control column to set attitude and then trim out the forces (and the Phantom seems to work better with this technique). Slight power adjustments rather than trim changes can also help with electric (as opposed to more precise manual trim wheel) systems. Having said that, I have recently heard a fast jet pilot say that once basically trimmed out on an ILS approach, he'd leave the joystick alone and adjust attitude with pitch trim clicks... But he was flying something more modern than a Phantom!

Absolutely - manual trim wheels in real flying are more precise than electric trim buttons. I do have a PC control unit with a trim wheel but I can never get it to work properly so you have to use a hat switch, which means trimming e.g. the MSFS Cessnas is much harder in the sim than it is in real life. Trimming jets in DCS, including the Phantom, can be fiddly but I understand it’s authentic and feels right to me. However, I have just discovered that assigning pitch trimming to the small wheel on the top of my newly-acquired Virpil joystick (plus extension) is much easier to use than a four-way hat or button. It might not be as realistic but is easier to use.