Frequency Congestion

[webstalle]

Hi PE,

I've been offline for a while and recently returned, starting with flights at uncontrolled fields (L70, L45).
CTAF tuned in, I could hear a bunch of transmissions from several facilties, Center, Approach, Tower and the like.
It was almost impossible to self announce intentions; it took a while to radio my intended take off.
While on the ground it's easy to wait for end of any transmissions, it gets worse when approaching an uncontrolled field. Either you skip self announcement on CTAF and just Approach and land, or one has to step into other transmissions.

PE always claimed to run a radio environment close to that in the real world. The CTAF frequency congestion is far away from what one experiences in real life. I know that PE decided to disable frequency Isolation, so that everybody hears when a Controller is busy, thus to avoid stepping into active transmissions.

I would like to propose that that "Isolation" shall be reactivated at least for the CTAFs, just to make PE feel a little bit more real than it is at the moment.

Regards
Friedhelm/N26292

[Keith Smith]

Something is amiss. You shouldn't be hearing ATC if you're on a CTAF at a non-towered field. What frequency were you on and where were you flying?

To be clear, the idea of the freq isolation change is to reduce blocks when you're working with ATC. It wouldn't make any sense at all to be hearing ATC while you're on the CTAF at a non-towered field.

[webstalle]

Hi Keith,

It happened at L70 (Agua Dulce) at around 1730Z on Saturday, 19/09. CTAF was 122.8.

Regards,

Friedhelm

[wmburns]

FWIIW, I conducted an FSE flight into L70 over this past weekend. When I cancelled flight following and changed to CTAF on 122.8 I stopped hearing the main PE ATC traffic as expected.

I could see the drones in the L70 traffic pattern. While I made my CTAF calls, the drones did their silent drone thing. I joined the pattern with the drones and landed without incident.

Bottom line. At least for me at the same airport, the PE radio system worked as expected.

Is it possible that the radio switch didn't take? One way to trouble shoot is to use the PE live map and see what the PE server "thinks" your radios are tuned to. Simply click on your airplane. The tuned frequency is one of the data fields displayed in the pop-up window.

For my own part, one of the mistakes I commonly make is when using COM2 to check ATIS and forget to set the radio panel back to COM1. Then when I hit the swap button I'm actually swapping COM2 when I think I"m switching COM1. The result is that I make a CTAF announcement on the main frequency.

[Keith Smith]

Friedhelm,

Try it again and let me know if you can replicate it. If so, drop a note to support@pilotedge.net and we'll make a time to monitor it in real time while you test it and I'll try to find out why it's consistently happening to you.

I use the CTAF a lot (on most of my flights, in fact) and have never seen this happen before.

[webstalle]

Keith, wmburns

I'll give it´a try tonight (2230Z); I'll will also pay Special attention to the clues given by wmburns.
I also used CTAF a lot in the past, and it always worked fine.

Regards
Friedhelm