First off thank you all for a brilliant turnout, with the 2 guys from 333VFW along it went pretty good from an organisational view. Apologies for the confusion RE Simple radio, the decision to change happened quite late in the day, however it was a relatively easy fix in the end.
The comms on the whole where well handled however I know I was guilty of laxness later in the mission forgetting to change to internal. There also needs to be a system in place for the OC to have discussions with other assets without the other flights listening. So can I suggest SOP is for any lengthy discussions the AMC switches to the relevant internal freq.

Lights. Please observe SOP. Anti collision when starting engines. switch to flashing nav lights till formed on runway ready for T/O then all lights off before take off

If we do this together again I suggest slick flights form in smaller groups IE 2x 4 slicks and in formation if you are flying sideways your doing it wrong. If in doubt look at slip indicator. Special mention to Dabomb who sticks like glue, nice flying for the most part guys but it always gets a lot tighter when we have four ships or less. So keep practicing

Enjoyed having a mission commander to keep things moving along and keep us organised. Most things from Bandit flights perspective went well, we lost 2 slicks to a possible collision enroute to the PUZ but both pilots managed to rejoin and pick up troops. We then waited for the go from AMC and proceeded to the HZ where I endangered everyone with my piss poor LZ choice

All in all though I enjoyed the whole session and a few DCS bugs could not detract from the pleasure.
In future we can remove smoke marker from AFAC so its all co-ords or laser spot search

Special mention in dispatches to WO1 Blade who was the only pilot to fly his original bird for the entire mission

Great fun, enjoyed it a lot  

As said in the other thread, the FACA script works well and is easy to use. Great mission, Cib - more like that please...

Ref: OC switching radios, I'm interested to know how it would be done in the real world? But point taken - I think that could also have been improved by better brevity on my part. Couple of other things to consider if implementing that idea:

- KA-50's can only monitor 1 freq

- Changing freqs in the Gazelle is a faff if flying as a single pilot (if planned in advance you could have all the FM freqs programmed into the FM channel selector when creating the mission, though).

- I couldn't get the VHF freq to change in SR when I changed it in the aircraft, and changing it in the aircraft didn't seem to change the actual frequency. I have been reading the manual to check if I was using the radio correctly (can't see anything like a "commit freq" button), and looking around the web for related problems, but couldn't find anything. Anyone know why?

- As per my other post, I think we need to agree how TS and SR are to be used in conjunction... do we all mute everything and can only be contacted by a poke (which would be a PITA with the Oculus), or should we use the "lobby" and "flight" channel concept (or some other idea)?

evilivan

It depends on what you want to achieve as a Air Mission Commander. Normally you would be in comms with the ground cmd and the flight commanders. You only have to give certain taskings and let them figure out what to do. The more you start to micro manage (not saying that was the case Ivan) the higher your workload will be.

The fact that you also fullfilled the role as a FAC or recce element did not make ot easier for you. Preferably as an AMC you get in an aircraft with plenty of radio equipement, a map and a coffee and stay somewhere overhead with lots of Line of Sight for the radios, without any further tasks in a mission and just coordinate tasking to certain flights (remember where Strut was in the battalion mission?).

Also making use of the volume knobs will help. Our radios in the 64 are controlled via one panel, I was always rotating those volume knobs depending on what I was doing. Dont turn them all the way down, but just far enough that once you hear your callsign you can hear it and turn the radio up again. Ofcourse multicrew is a big help then.

(B/229) evilivan wrote:- As per my other post, I think we need to agree how TS and SR are to be used in conjunction... do we all mute everything and can only be contacted by a poke (which would be a PITA with the Oculus), or should we use the "lobby" and "flight" channel concept (or some other idea)?

evilivan

my opinion: At least in a mission of this scale TS should be used for pre-flight only like you did it (as kind of a Ready-Room). Once in the cockpit only SR should be in use - just like "as real as it gets".
But: for myself normally I keep TS active and also do not have to mute myself because I have another dedicated PTT-button for SR and TS. So I am more or less always able to monitor and answer on TS in case somebody is joining later and needs to know what's going on or lost radios or whatever.

be flexiable i would say, but ts should be the starting point i woud say

I might be wrong but I think what evilivan is saying is just we need to have some "radio discipline" on TS too, meaning if we want to keep TS for backup communication (leaving speakers on to hear it if necessary), then those who want to chat about anything else than the actual mission some people might be still flying, need to move to a different channel. Otherwise they will disturb the mission communication using the TS backup channel. No doubt about using TS for briefing, debriefing etc. Just my 2 cent...

Thanks for the replies, chaps.

Blade has summarised what I meant very nicely... My point was somewhat selfishly driven by being an Oculus user; anything that requires me to take off my headset is annoying and disruptive (and can result in a crash).

The path of least resistance says that we will probably leave things as they are, so I will just mute both mic and sound in TS when in 'pit with SR.

@Xtra: thanks. I guess the FAC function would normally have had it's own frequency in this scenario, separate to the battalion net, which would have pretty much solved the problem in this case...

(B/229) evilivan wrote: My point was somewhat selfishly driven by being an Oculus user

No, "private" chatter on TS was pretty distracting for (most likely) anyone else still in the mission, not just for those w/ Rift on. Not blaming anyone, we just didn't agree yet (if I'm not mistaken) on 229th TS SOP, and it was used for chatter most of the times otherwise...

(B/229) Blade wrote:"private" chatter on TS was pretty distracting

...I guess that the "chatterers" would argue that if we had muted TS we wouldn't have been distracted....

(B/229) evilivan wrote:

(B/229) Blade wrote:"private" chatter on TS was pretty distracting

...I guess that the "chatterers" would argue that if we had muted TS we wouldn't have been distracted....

They might, but if we mute mics and/or speakers, how could TS act as a backup (as we agreed on)?

(B/229) Blade wrote:how could TS act as a backup (as we agreed on)?

...and I believe we have come full circle!   That was the point of my original post: should we use TS as the back up in case of technical problems (and therefore it should not be used as a chat channel), or do we just use 'pokes' or similar? I don't believe we have decided yet.

Sorry guys... I was one of the Huey flight using TS... I got back @ 19.30 hrs and jumped right on the server.  Once I had learned you had gone back to SR 1.2.6.0 (that did work with my PC) I was scrambling to install it and crank up the Huey at the same time... I even lost the Huey on the runway line-up when I lost the main screen focus while diving between screens.  I gave up on trying to install SR and kept with TS.  Although I followed the flight to the PUZ with no SR comms, I got caught out on the first LZ when I overshot the flight when I did'nt realize in time that Cib was hauling the flight up for the LZ...  I bailed out to the right of the flight to avoid a collision and dumped the Huey into the right-hand slope of the valley, d'oh!  Anyhow, while it lasted it was great fun... but all my mishaps were self inflicted; I have mentally logged them all as part of the learning curve. Sorry for the mess guys... and well done to those that survived and got their birds back to base in one piece. ^

I went back to base after losing it in the valley, could not enter another slick (?)... so tooled up a gunship up for a fly round.

While suffering from man-flu (not been on since), I have re-installed SR v 1.2.6.0 and that is all working now  I hope to be on tomorrow night.

...oh, Cib, another blonde moment, you mentioned the HZ in your de-brief... what is an 'HZ' ?

Holding Zone

Thanks evil... why did'nt I know that

(B/229) IJammer wrote:Sorry guys... I was one of the Huey flight using TS...

Hi IJammer,

No, you were using TS strictly for mission communication only, which was totally OK under the circumstances you described.