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A few days ago I headed down to Hangar Lake, local float plane base, after work to make some HDR photos of the airplanes since we had such nice weather it would have been a waste not to This was Myron Angstman’s (I believe) Cessna 172:

There was another 172, a 207, Maule and Aviat A-1B docked along the shore, plus this Piper PA-18 belonging to the State Troopers or Fish & Game, looking just awesome in HDR with such intense blues:

I’d set up a function key on my EOS 50D to allow the AEB switching to be easily able to shoot more than 3 bracketed exposures, so these photos and others on Flickr were from a 1EV 5 exposure sequence in Photomatix. This gave a much more even tone and less graininess which I experienced doing a 3 exposure sequence last week with the abandoned Army truck and burned down house. There’s definitely some great uses out here to capture the range of tones, especially blue skies. I can imagine in the winter time especially there could be some fantastic opportunities at sunrise and sunset!

My flight in to Anchorage last night was uneventful. Wasn’t busy at all, so we weren’t crammed in to the ‘departure lounge’ such that Bethel has, and then was quiet on the plane with plenty of free seats so no-one next to me. Anti-social much ? I got a rental car no problem, not as expensive as I expected for a 5-day rental with all the extra fees + insurance. Puffin Inn is louder than I’d hoped for, though my room is right next to Spenard Rd., but for a little over $50 a night I can’t complain. Am meeting up with Tim tomorrow and staying with him the rest of my trip as he’s flying in this evening for a week and has a house in town. Hockey tomorrow night beckons us.

I got a bunch of shopping down at Walmart – thankfully their bush order department is back up + running so I could simply drop it off with them to get mailed back. Makes it easier than packing everything up in rubbermaid’s myself and paying $17 a piece with the postal service. I think I might get a bottle or case of beer or 6 now I can have it shipped back direct from Gold Rush too. Food shopping I’ll leave until Monday or Tuesday. I also got to enjoy the delights of Dairy Queen, something definately missing in Bethel, as well as picking up a pay as you go cell phone from AT&T. I’m sick of playing phone tag with friends trying to catch up when I’ve been in Anchorage the last few times, and as much as I hate them out in Bethel, is at least vaguely useful here.

Today brought the end of a dream though, at least for the foreseeable future. Actually, I ripped out a whole bunch of text here I spent ages writing. I think I needed to try and get it out, but don’t necessarily want to post it. Anyways, I couldn’t be issued a medical certificate for flying due to another medical appointment earlier today so the whole idea of staying in Bethel over the summer and learning to fly is out the window. Raises more questions as to the validity of staying in Bethel in general now unfortunately.

I still have options aside from learning to fly – have thought about aviation maintenance for quite some time (both UAA and UAF offer courses), and studying digital arts and design is ever growing in appeal with a view to doing more with my photography. I want to try and get the green card renewal all square before getting back to thinking *where* I want to be. I know I just have too many things I’m trying to juggle all at once, at least having some things taken away lessens the load. I keep this quote in my head a lot too.

This post jumped around a lot. I need some sleep and the knowledge I can go get 8 cases of beer shipped out to me tomorrow…

Made it back into Tunt okay this evening – definately a different kinda of weekly commute! Yute Air have just moved hangars a couple of days ago, so were in even more of a mess than usual. They now have 3 or 4 check-in counters with the ladies wearing Bluetooth headsets to answer the phones and a PA system to announce flights leaving, but still have about as much common sense and customer service skills as before. A couple are general pretty good, but getting told off for carrying my laptop bag out there when that’s what I was told to do after asking for a fragile sticker wasn’t great, and just turned comical when they were loading bags back onto planes than had just flown in and passengers were running out the terminal trying to grab them as the baggage handlers were clueless. Worst part is they’re still probably best of the worst out here! I used to like Yute as they never took themselves too seriously and realised they were a bush airline rather than getting a little pretentious and snotty like Hageland seem to have done.

I’ll be flying back into Bethel on Sunday, but hoping I can get some rest in the mean time. Nice to see Kat again, and Mia mauled me as soon as I got home. Guess that’s how you get attention from her when you enter the house – leave her for 4 days! But, will be nice to take a step back from things and then get ready for next week. Need to figure out what to take up for the new apartment and stuff which should be fun. Kat is meant to be in Bethel at the end of September for a couple of days training so will get to see it soon too – sure she could bring some bits + pieces up too.

After waiting around in Tunt due to a thunder + lightning storm rolling around, Carl called me up and we got of Tunt around 9.30p.m. Pretty cool flying in a Cessna 172 for the first time and I could hear all the radio chatter too which makes it more interesting than on the bush flights when sat up front and just have the drone of the engine to listen to! He gave me a ride into town which was really good of him, and the B&B is really nice – they’ve only been open about a year and is probably one of the nicest places you’ll find in town Their Wi-Fi is pretty fast too!

Hoping to get some sleep ready for an early start tomorrow. Getting pretty nervous as kinda tired now with waiting around so long in Tunt, and just want to get started and the first day out the way!

Yesterday we drove back up from Homer to Anchorage, and then today was a shopping day for Kat + I whilst my parents wandered around downtown and relaxed a little. We got a bunch of stuff shipped back from Walmart including a bunch of dog food for Mia, and also mailed back about 15 bags of cereal in a couple of rubbermade boxes via USPS to keep us stocked up for a little while! It was a lot of stop + starting around town all day, but productive. As we were packing up the cereal and dried foods at Carrs, we were right under the approach path for the general aviation traffic coming in to Merrill Field which was pretty cool under the blue skies we’ve been experiencing (temperature in the 70’s all day today ):

Tomorrow we’re driving up to just outside Denali NP where we have a log cabin for three nights, including the full day Kantishna wilderness bus tour through the park on Saturday. Given the current weather, it should be great as it’s due to stay clear until Sunday/Monday, and staying in a log cabin in the area should be an experience too. Coming back down to Anchorage on Monday we’re stopping off in Talkeetna for the Sun Dog Iditarod kennel tour which Kat is really looking forward to!

Now that I can steal Kat’s camera (she’s asleep, will never know ), I can put together some shots of a ‘little’ project I’ve been working the past month or so…

As I spend quite a bit of time playing flight simulator on the PC, using the mouse to click buttons to change radio frequencies, control the GPS, or even just flick switches to turn on or off navigation lights doesn’t quite cut it compared to sitting in the cockpit of a real airplane. This realisation materialised long before I actually took the intro flight in the Cessna 152 last month There are people who literally spend thousands of dollars and hundreds (if not thousands) of hours rebuilding complete Boeing 737 or Airbus A319 flight decks which look amazing, though a little difficult to accomplish out here. Plus, you’re pretty much pigeon-ed into flying that one particular type of aircraft. The in-between are companies like GoFlight or SimKits which build + sell individual panel components to connect together allowing to utilise them as you see fit and for controlling any aircraft you wish to load up in flight simulator. Again, fantastic units, but still more than a little pricey at $110 plus shipping for a basic 8-button or switch panel.

Since I can’t complain about not having time to build something similar myself and being able to pick + choose the various electrical components myself from various suppliers online, I er, did:

It still needs a couple of sheets of balsa wood for the top parts of each panel which I’ll get in Anchorage next month, but everything is functional and otherwise complete. Some of the labels aren’t perfectly straight and I could do with adjusting some of the push buttons on the autopilot panel so they are all aligned, but it wasn’t built to score any style points! It runs off four USB to 20 button interface modules produced by Desktop Aviator which provide the core controls. These were a great find, even if the articles on flightsim.com which explain how to use toggle switches, push buttons and rocker switches were slightly biased in recommending them given the author of the articles is the founder of the Desktop Aviator But, I liked the way I could buy just one or two and add in functionality over time (which is exactly what I did to make sure I could do what I wanted to do with them in the first place before).

The first completed section was based just off rocker switches and push buttons. The rotary switches for the autopilot panel were added later:

The electronics behind were not all that complicated – the push buttons connect straight to the input pins on the USB interface controller, whereas the toggle or rocker switches require a simple circuit built around an optoisolator to generate a ‘pulse’ as the switch is flicked to allow the computer to recognise the input. The flightsim.com article and instructions on the Desktop Aviator website explain it all in detail and isn’t hard, just time consuming, as this part of the panel required 20 of these small circuits to be soldered. But, figuring on about a $1 for a rocker/toggle switch, $1 for the optoislator, and maybe another $1 total for a capacitor, two resistors and diode, factoring in the USB controller being $29 for 20 inputs, you’re still looking at less than $5 per input. The fantastic plastic panels at 75c each also from Steve at Desktop Aviator were great too as it meant I could drill them however I wanted to group the buttons and switches to my liking.

The radio panel was the main section I wanted to build, as all available solutions are either complicated, expensive, or both. Dual rotary push button switches aren’t easy to find and pricey when you can, and also require either a separate interface controller (usually the more expensive kind used in high-end simulators where you have 80+ inputs per controller) or meant you have to program your own microcontroller to interpret rotating clockwise or anti-clockwise. For the hardcore who won’t accept anything less, they’ll pay quite a price for these kind of inputs, but me, I’ll take a little less!

Taking a basic single-pole 12-position rotary switch (one of the most commonly available at about $2.50) and wiring up pins 1-5-9 and then 3-7-11, it creates the equivalent of a standard toggle switch. To switch between Mhz and Khz when adjusting radio frequencies, after connecting the output of the rotary switch to the standard pulse circuit, the output of this pulse circuit normally going straight to the USB interface controller instead connects to what would be the output of a SPDT toggle switch. The upper terminal can then connect to an input pin on the controller, and the lower terminal to another input pin. Now, when you flip the toggle switch, the rotary controller’s output is sends a different event to the PC. Here’s the circuit to explain a bit better (yes, pretty much just what’s on the Desktop Aviator site):

With the way the rotary switch is wired, you only get a pulse sent on every second ‘click’ as we have a break between our contacts. In practice, this actually works nicely, as with FSUPIC which is used to pass the controls to flight sim, it needs a 1/4 second pause (I believe) between inputs otherwise it won’t recognise it, so if you were rotating very quickly, it wouldn’t register anyways. If you had a rotary switch that had a slightly smoother contact point on the rear (as oppose to mine which has quite a large ball which makes a definitive click and clunk), you probably wouldn’t notice it really. Still, our drawback (for the moment…) is that rotating either clockwise or counter-clockwise, we can’t make a difference in whether we’re increasing or decreasing our radio frequency. This is where the more complicated solutions involving a dedicated microcontroller would read in a binary output from the rotary switch (if we wired up our other contacts in the same manner) to calculate what position the switch is being moved to/from and thus whether it’s going up or down. In contact with Desktop Aviator, they are actually producing a pre-programmed chip to do just this, but no word on pricing. Anyway, my simple solution is to use a modifier key within FSUIPC.

In FSUIPC, I mapped each rotary switch to send a key command rather than an action in flight simulator. For example, rotating the rotary switch for COM 1 will map to Ctrl-C by FSUIPC, and then you can set Ctrl-C to represent COM RADIO WHOLE INC. Fairly straightfoward. Then, add another key mapping for Ctrl-Shift-C to represent COM RADIO WHOLE DEC. Hold down shift whilst rotating the rotary switch and now the frequency will decrease. Technically, you can continue rotating the rotary switch clockwise and it will decrease so long as you’re holding down the Shift key but that’s no fun As I use the CH Yoke, the left rear button on the yoke is set as the Shift key, so I simply hold my finger down on the button whilst rotating the rotary switch counter-clockwise to decrease the frequency; release the button and turn clockwise to increase the frequency. Repeat this key-mapping process where Shift acts as the modifier key to decrease the frequency for the other COM and NAV functions, and with the toggle switch on both Mhz and Khz.

Sounds like a clunky process, but in practice it’s all pretty natural. When leaning over to adjust the radios, you’d keep your left hand on the yoke anyway, so it’s no problem to press you finger on the button at the rear of the yoke. Flicking between the Mhz and Khz positions is no harder than moving your fingers between the inner and outer knobs on a dual-rotary switch. I also put in two push buttons for each control – one to enable the COM or NAV channel and another to switch standby frequency. Really, the only thing missing is an LED screen showing the frequency and your adjustments, but that’s getting back into substantially increasing cost + complexity. With this setup, each rotary switch requires 2 inputs on the USB interface controller, plus one each for selecting the channel and standby frequency. To do both COM 1 + 2 and NAV 1 + 2, it works out to about $50 including the cost of the USB interface controller. A 3rd of the price of the GoFlight unit, though admitedly requiring a little more work to get going and not providing exact functionality of those in a real airplane by having. Still, for those on budget and with the time and patience to build the controls themselves, very worthwhile.

Other cool features I included was a GPS panel which happily recreates the Garmin GNS 430’s found in the EagleSoft Cirrus SR-22 and the default Garmin 500 model within FS2004. The rotary controls work in the same way as the radio controls. I also used another rotary switch to represent the ignition switch of a GA aircraft, and then a selection of buttons and a toggle switch for sending the transponder code and going between standby + on. There’s no direct controls available for FSUIPC to do things like IDENT but you won’t get that unless you fly online with something like VATSIM, with clients providing that functionality anyways.

Whilst building these avionics panels, I also came a lightweight, quick, and free voice recognition utility called Shoot which allows you to speak commands and have the computer respond. This is my way of ‘talking’ to ATC without $50 on VoxATC or similar. Again, it’s not going to perfectly replicate talking to ATC with the correct phrases, but in conjunction with Peter Wilding’s control set and adding in a bunch of other commands, I can say “Ready for taxi for north departure” even though all Shoot sends to flight sim is ‘4′ (or whatever) to select from the text-based prompt in the ATC window. Makes things a lot more realistic, and after a few flights of adding in commands on the fly (no pun intended!) as I came across a new ATC command to set, I very fairly have to just say the numbers to move through menus.

All in all, pretty happy with the setup now, as it certainly gives me a lot more to do when flying, and kept me entertained for a good while figuring out how to do it all and then building up the circuits and wiring the controls. An awful lot cheaper than buying pre-built modules, and let me build it exactly how I wanted, such as for the GPS panel. If you have no interest in flight sim, all this has probably made no sense, but will at least give you something to read to help you sleep! And if anyone is trying to do something similar, let me know in the comments to share your ideas + suggestions or if you have any problems.

Made it back to Tunt from Anchorage with only a 5 hour wait hanging around in Bethel at Hageland… Pretty tired as was a lot of darting around from store to store getting things together or mailing back, but at least the weather was good, and I managed to get an intro pilot lesson with Take Flight out of Merrill Field too which was good and cleared up a lot of things in my mind:

I got to the aviation museum on Lake Hood, munched away on Subways, Pizza Hut, Wendys, Taco Bell and McDonalds (along with some very nice salmon, prawns + halibut at one of Damond’s friend’s birthdays), and spent more time shopping than is good for a bloke really!

Being able to hang out with Damond in Anchorage, and make the use of one of his cars (a great big Suburban – way bigger than anything else I’ve driven before, and certainly not *quite* as economical as the Prius last summer given gas is at $4/gallon now), was cool, and overall it was a good trip. The snow has pretty much gone in Tunt now and the river broke a day or two ago, although the Kuskokwim itself hasn’t started flowing yet, but with the joy of Walmart I bought two big cans of bug spray so I’m prepared for being out here this summer!

Having fun with the waiting game of ‘will my bush plane turn up?’, but the weather isn’t too bad so should be okay. In Anchorage until Friday lunchtime, and already got my shopping lists from Kat She’s just mad I get to eat takeaway for every meal, even though someone is going away herself in two weeks time…

But, Lake Hood opened up on Friday which will be fun to see the float planes moving around again, and I’m also planning on getting my pilot medical done along with a couple of intro flying lessons, all being well. No idea when I’ll have internet as I’m staying at a friend’s house, so might be Friday lunchtime back at Anchorage airport before I can get any photos online or get my e-mail.

Well, the warm weather at the start of last week was just a teaser. It cooled down again the middle of the week and froze over, and then the last couple of days there’s been some gentle blowing snow most of the time covering the ice. The tundra is still very bare + exposed so it’s kinda a mixed look outside, and still staying down around 15F (-10C) with windchill. Haven’t been out on the snowmobile anyway as the tundra is all exposed around the houses, and don’t really have anywhere to go on it with the weather swinging around!

A few more locals have been getting boats ready though – one of them by the river had a big pile of broken ice next to it which looked like someone had lost control of their sled after being ice chipping, but then the inside of the boat was thick with ice and it’s owner had been breaking it out! I’ve seen a couple getting towed along the river too, again, probably to get out seal hunting along the coast:

Isn’t quite as gruesome as some of the photos recently published out of Canada though, honest.

On the plus side (segue from clubbing seals…?!), GTA IV arrived through the mail this afternoon – about time, as I pre-ordered it last summer, even though it’s final release date wasn’t until this past Tuesday Pretty cool though, so can’t wait to get to stuck into it later on this evening

I’m also heading into Anchorage on May 12th for a few days, partly just to get out the village for a bit! I’m meeting up with a friend who lives there, and hoping to get an introductory flying lesson (TSA approval required for anything more) and pilot medical done whilst I’m there. Slowly moving forward I guess. Should be good, and Damond used to work in Denali National Park and has lived around the Anchorage area all his life, so I can pick his brains for when we head out at the end of July when my parents fly over Can get some shopping done and mail stuff back to keep us going over the summer as well – think I’ll have one box just of mosquito repellant!

On Monday evening I uploaded the first of some files I’ve been working on with flight sim to a couple of the major flight sim sites that provide file libraries to collect resources like that together. The first was a complete package for Grant Aviation including repaints of the Cessna 207 and 208’s that fly in + out of the village, along with AI flight plans I’d worked out so that you get the planes flying around in flight simulator as you would do in real life. This area of Alaska is pretty much devoid of anything in flight sim (not unlike in real life I guess!), but the addition of some traffic makes such a difference and is pretty cool seeing them moving around Bethel and out to the villages. I wasn’t expecting many people to pay much attention to them, but there’s been over 1000 downloads within the first 72 hours Probably taper off after they move out the latest uploads pages, but nice to see. I’ve already got planes and flight plans pretty much worked out for Hageland Aviation and good ol’ Yute Air (just wish I could figure out a ‘randomness’ factor so sometimes the planes simply don’t turn up…) which I’ll be uploading in the new few days too. The files are available from my flight sim section, and here’s an idea of what some of the Grant planes look like:

Yesterday afternoon I went out for a while jigging (short retirement, I know…) on the Galic River. Got three hooks ripped off whilst trying to haul fish in as the hole wasn’t cut properly at the bottom and was catching the line so headed home, but did have a bit of fun riding out there – this is Pam bundled up in the sled behind Nick + Dana, Mott leading us, then a couple of guys obviously nervous the river was liable to break up

I’d guess they were just moving downriver to be able to get out seal hunting shortly, but was still funny seeing a boat being towed along the frozen river by a snowmobile!

This afternoon, moose foot and me wandered along to the airport and saw a Hageland 207 struggling to come in to land with the wind. Even the pilots have been joking on the radio about how windy it is when coming in to land. Barely seems like they’ve moving sometimes as they’re on final to land.

Least this guy took a little more time on his takeoff run-up – look at how much movement he got out the airplane whilst checking the elevator:

Kat’s feeling a lot better now, I’m blaming it on the broccoli she had on the Sunday evening with dinner The snow does seem to be slowly melting away, and there’s a lot of standing water and cracks forming on the rivers. Riding out to the Galic river yesterday the area looked so different to just a couple of weeks ago with patches of exposed tundra, so the ice may well start to break up in the next couple of weeks. Seems unlikely given how much snow and ice there’s still down (well over 5 foot thick ice yesterday), but the temperature has been slowly rising and due to carry on over the next week up to 40F. Maybe spring is here!