Hello, Rupertbear from Brisbane here

[rupertbear]

Hi all

I have been browsing the site for a while now but didn't want to post until I had something to show. Attached are some pics of my generic GA Simpit. It is loosely based on a Cessna 172 configuration. For GA flight, I've found that the Saitek Pro Flight range is reliable and relaively cost-effective. For flying around Australia, there is nothing better than Orbyx FTX scenery. If you look at some of the photos carefully, you'll see that my pit is named, VH-KEC. This registration is in recognition of my longsuffering wife, Karen, who has tolerated and even encouraged my simpitting endeavours.

I hope to post more in the future as I develop the pit and am happy to answer any questions.

Regards
Rupertbear

[jackpilot]

Welcome to the site.
Very nice GA setup.
Are the instruments on small LCDs?
Looks great!
What kind of visual?

Jack

(as a "conservative" pilot, I would shift the engine instruments (tach and gages) on the right side of the cluster)

[Aerosim Solutions]

Welcome RupertBear from a fellow aussie...nice GA pit you have there

Cheers
Gwyn
Aerosim Solutions
Perth, Western Australia

[jackpilot]

...to be able to hang "up" the phone... 

[bnepethomas]

good to see another Brissy build.. north or south of the river

Whats you thoughts on the Saitek throttle?

cheers

Peter

[rupertbear]

Thanks for all the greetings and interest. I thought I'd posted more pics but it seems I only managed to attach one. I'll try again but am somewhat new to this having been until now a reader of forums rather than a contributor. I'll try to change that.

For visuals, I'm running three Asus 27" monitors from two Nvidia GTX 580 cards in SLI surround mode. I quite like the Saitek instruments and peripherals. The only one I had difficulties with was the TPM unit. For a while, I just couldn't get it to calibrate properly until I discovered some posts on another forum. For the throttle and mixture levers, the sensitivity sliders needed to be set all the way to the right and the null zone set at nil. Now it works fine and I especially like it because years ago I used to putter around the Archerfield training area in nice old well-used Cessna 172. The Flight X Audio adaptor even enables me to use my old aviation headset. This pit is definitely a great second childhood for me and probably even more fun than the real thing was.

One of the things I'm interested in for the future would be to work out how to get two more monitors added to display 90 degrees left and right views. I think the only way to do this at the moment is to run Wideview on networked PCs. I don't really want to go down this route but from what we've seen of graphics technology recently, I'm hoping the solution will appear soon.

[Kennair]

Hi Rupertbear, good to see another Aussie onboard and another GA pit.

As to the surround view question, if you are using two video cards you could achieve a full wrap around on the one PC by adding a Matrox Triple Head 2 Go on one output for the 3 screen front view then attach 2 more monitors two other outputs for the left and right view.  You would need to disable SLI mode in order to get access the the video outputs on your second card however.  No biggie as FSX can't make use of SLI anyway.  Configure the window views in your saved flights *.flt file in order to get true left and right views.  There is a big caveat to doing this however, the CPU drain on your system will be substantial unless you have a belly-buster PC in which case this might not pose too much of an issue.

Cheers,

Ken.