Avionics Bending: VHF/HF COM Radio Integration with X-Plane (Part 9)

Gables Radio Controller, Audio Panel and Lexicon Multi Channel Audio Interface

Up until now all the audio you heard on the previous blog postings had been live streaming ATC traffic from the Internet. While that is very cool, it is not really useful in the simulator. In the sim we want to be talking to real air traffic controllers. The good thing is that there are several large virtual flight traffic controller communities out there and VATSIM is one of them. Vatsim is a very active community, especially here around Atlanta, and you can connect to it from many different flight simulators. For this blog posting I use X-Plane as the simulator and the XSquawkbox plugin to connect to VATSIM. The video below shows a short demonstration of the end-to-end implementation of the actual flight hardware made by Gables using ARINC 429, the Laminar Research X-Plane simulator and XSquawkbox: