Jean Paul,

I can’t speak for what Chris uses for flying, but the most common recommendation for a headset you’ll get from VATSIM users is to get a USB headset, which provides its own audio device. This way, you can route the aircraft and environmental sounds through your PC’s speakers, while your headset only sends and receives radio communications. This is more realistic, and makes it easier to adjust the volume of other people’s voices without affecting the sound of your plane.

The Logitech ClearChat Comfort USB is a common recommendation. Not too pricey, lightweight, and has a mic that’s plenty fine for flying or controlling online. If you have money to burn, Plantronics headsets are also highly recommended, as that’s what real world ATC tends to use, at least in the U.S. and Canada.

djcoax, IVAO actually split of from SATCO, the same group that died and spawned VATSIM from its ashes. While very similar, they have different goals, and the competition is probably a good thing. IVAO is definitely more Europe-centric than VATSIM, but VATSIM still has a healthy European contingent.

Many virtual airlines fly on both networks, actually, so that’d be a great way to get to know IVAO once people are familiar with VATSIM.

Bruce,
All is not lost if you have an 1/8″ headset. If you have both an on-motherboard audio device and a separate PCI audio device, you can use them both, one going to your speakers and the other handling your headset, and can then configure your flight sim accordingly. You should be able to pick up another sound card for not that much cash—even in Canada, I can buy an Asus 5.1 DTS-capable sound card with optical out and a headphone amp for $22.

Alternately, you can do what I did for my first year of flying on VATSIM—get a cheap USB audio device from Monoprice or somewhere else, and you have the same effect. They’re not the greatest quality for $10, but you really don’t need anything fancy for flying—you just need mic and headset jacks. For controlling, the USB audio device was lacking when I needed to monitor several ATC frequencies at a time, but for flying, it worked just fine.

The goal isn’t USB per se, it’s about having a second audio device. Having digital audio can be nice for some things, but it’s certainly not a necessity.

Gary,
That not all that uncommon—I actually worked my way up to controlling tower before I had the nerve to fly on the network! I think having a controlling curriculum but not having a flying one is what made me more comfortable with controlling first. This VATSIM series (along with Comms101 and indeed all of AviatorPro) is an attempt to solve the pilot curriculum problem.

Fabrizio,
We’ll cover much of what you wrote about later in the series, but I’ll address a few points briefly.

Connecting do different servers won’t help the audio quality problem. We can only work on improving your own transmissions, with the exception of disabling the VHF simulation option in some pilot clients. Try toggling that one off or on, and see what you prefer. Comms in general (and for real) can be spotty at times, so developing an ear for these kinds of things will come with experience. This is also why standardized phraseology is so important—the context and knowing what to expect make things much easier to understand.

If you’re not sure when to contact a controller, he’ll probably send you a ‘contact me’ message around the time when you enter his airspace. We’ll cover this in a later episode on communication etiquette, along with the controlling hierarchy.

As for how to manage your approach, that’s mostly on the pilot to sort out, ’cause the controller doesn’t know how to fly your plane. If you need to descend, ask for lower; if you need to slow down, just go ahead and slow down unless you were given a speed to hold. I’m not saying you’ll never get a bad vector to final (you will on VATSIM from time to time), but that human on the other side making mistakes occasionally is part of what makes VATSIM so fun and challenging. We all have to work around each other, and unlike a game, this part just isn’t predictable, so stay on your toes!

Chris,
It sure can be harder in Europe, especially with planning a route—it’s so easy to come up with a route that’s unacceptable, with so many specific preferred routes to take from location to location. The RNAV that’s so prevalent is already well taught by Chris in previous AviatorPro episodes, but we’ll try to address some of the differences in future episodes as the context dictates.

I know Chris and I are both mostly familiar with North American flying, but we’ll be focusing not so much on the specific regional details, and will be focusing on the generally VATSIM-specific things. Many of the differences are somewhat superficial, as flying is still pretty standardized globally. As Bart Simpson said (paraphrased), “the stupid little differences aren’t as important as the big, stupid similarities.”

It’s always up to the pilot to do their homework, online or for real, as to the local procedures at their origin and destination fields. What we will do is show you where to find that information, and hopefully some tools to help you along the way.

Peter, that nervousness is exactly the type of thing we’re aiming to help with. Knowing how VATSIM works, and who to contact, coupled with the communications you’ll learn in the Comms101 episodes, will surely see your confidence increase.

You can still bet on being nervous when you key that mic the first time, though, no matter how thoroughly trained you are. That’ll go away soon enough, however.

Rj,
Our next episode will be covering software installation and configuration. If you need to recover your old password or simply reactivate an old account, member services should be able to help you out: http://www.vatsim.net/about-vatsim/members/memberservice/