Carenado C90 Transponder Issue

[bawells]

During two flights tonight I was informed by ATC that I had a five digit transponder code, were able to get by with idents and transponder cycling but the end result on the controllers side was a target with no data block, just a direction and a blip. Between the first and second flights I reset the transponder, shutdown x-plane and reloaded - no joy.

Once I was on the ground from the second flight I pulled up the Data Red Editor plugin and did a search for the transponder and low and behold '4642' had become '14642'. It appears that once the transponder code is busted it remains busted even if you change it on the radio panel/reload the aircraft/reload the sim.

The good news is that it is fixable! If you have the Data Ref Editor plugin just search for 'transponder_code' (you should get sim/cockpit/radios/transponder_code and sim/cockpit2/radios/actuators/transponder_code) and select the code and change it to drop the extra digit.

This seems to be isolated to the C90 - FlightSaitek and I swapped out the radios.lua file in the 'Custom Avionics' folder for the one that comes with the B200 from Carenado and I was unable to reproduce it. Oddly enough I've been flying the C90 on network for ~9 months now and have yet to encounter this issue or simply wasn't informed if it did - others that I was flying with last night mentioned that they've hit the same problem in the past and that it seems to be somewhat random. The only recent change (i.e. in the last few weeks) I made was upgrading to the new X-Plane PilotEdge plugin release back in June/July? I don't suspect this is the problem though.

If you're feeling daring here is a link to a 'patched' version of the radios.lua that makes it more like the B200 version that doesn't seem to exhibit the problem. Again, this will go in your /Carenado C90. . ./Custom Avionics/ folder, it goes without saying you should backup the original radios.lua before you replace it.

I'm going to do some more debugging on this later this when I'm not exhausted from our IMC adventures tonight - if anyone else has any feedback please post it!

[tshuff]

Make sure you report this bug to Carenado directly. Dan has hinted at another round of updates for these planes and this seems like a bug that could be fairly easily fixed.

[bawells]

Make sure you report this bug to Carenado directly. Dan has hinted at another round of updates for these planes and this seems like a bug that could be fairly easily fixed.

Absolutely, going to be writing it up this evening after work. I think I know what's causing it and it seems like a simple fix..

[Marcus Becker]

Oddly enough I've been flying the C90 on network for ~9 months now and have yet to encounter this issue or simply wasn't informed if it did - others that I was flying with last night mentioned that they've hit the same problem in the past and that it seems to be somewhat random.

From the ATC side, it happens a lot to us but most of us have adjusted understanding that if we see BE9L there's about a 50/50 chance we'll have a transponder issue and there isn't much we can do about it.

[bawells]

Thanks Marcus, I have to assume then that this happened to me before but wasn't informed - seems like others I've spoken to have had this happen as well.

I submitted issue #15589 to Carenado and will follow up on this thread with what I find out.

[bawells]

Got a reply from Dan Klaue on my bug..

I cannot reproduce what you're seeing with the C90. I am unable to make the XPDR code have an extra digit. And this is the first report of such a phenomenon that I've ever received.

As long as I cannot reproduce the problem, I wouldn't know what to fix about it. But you're saying that using the B200's radio.lua file fixes the issue for the C90?

Maybe the issue has already been fixed on my end, in anticipation of the v3.1 release. Now that X-Plane 10.40 is in its final state (just got out of beta last weekend), we'll start to publish v3.1 of the planes. I'll make a note of checking this issue, but I believe it may have been fixed on our end already.

Guess I'll wait for v3.1 of the C90 to be released and test it after..