[ACARS] Air Nav 4 - Feedback Invitation

[Peter Scheurich]

Hi Mike and others,

regarding b: I had the same problems with the selcal decoder. However, after
upgrade to the XP compatible version the integration into Airnav4 worked
nicely.

Greetings from Stuttgart,

Peter


Peter Scheurich, Stuttgart, Germany

-----Original Message-----
From: acars-admin@mailman.qth.net [mailto:acars-admin@mailman.qth.net]On
Behalf Of Mike
Sent: Dienstag, 16. April 2002 10:27
To: ACARS Group
Subject: [ACARS] Air Nav 4 - Feedback Invitation


Hi Everyone,

I have provided the following feedback to the Airnav 4 team on the limited
use I have so far made of the product.  I now invite your comments if you so
wish but also request that you CC Airnav so they can get a handle on user
feedback.

Hi,

I am sure that this product was well "beta" tested on a range of computers
but feel that some user feedback on the released product may be warranted
given some of the well documented problems with its predecessor.  I have
held of ordering Airnav 4 based on my experience with, and problems
encountered with Airnav 3, a summary of my thoughts and findings follow:

a.    I own a computer that lives in room with plenty of daylight and find
the colours chosen for the map do not show up well at all in daylight.  In
Airnav 3 there was a utility to change the colours but in version 4 this
seems to have either been missed by the developers or I cannot find the tool
for changing the colours.  Is this meant to be?

b.    I have the Airnav Selcal Decoder running on one soundcard and the
Airnav ACARS Decoder running on a second sound card, which seems to be
working OK but when I try to interface the Selcal decoder with Airnav 4 it
doesn't work.  I have removed the ACARS decoder and runn the Selcal decoder
on bothe sound cards but still the Airnav 4 interface does not recognise the
Selcal decoder.  I cannot integrate the selcal decoder into Airnav 4.

c.    Airnav 3 had a utility to automatically plot the proposed route of an
aircraft if two or more waypoints were entered.  This does not happen now in
Airnav 4 causing additional work to find out the advancing track of an
aircraft.  Again, is this missing on purpose?

d.    On ocassions during the 30 minutes trial period. opening up the Help
tool slows down the overall processes running on the computer until the
computer freezes and a reboot is required.  This may be because I am trying
to do too much within the limited time but I don't think it shoul crash my
system!

e.    When running the acars interface to the Airnav ACARS decoder, position
reports being reported by aircraft are displayed on the map but no aircraft
label can be found.  There is no effect when I try to Show/Hide Label
Details.  I cannot get the details of the flight displayed on the map.

f.    In the Flight Management Mode there is no Flight Number box to enter
flight number details, therefore I cannot manually create a flight unless I
do so in a Terminal Mode window.

g.    Someone has omitted the South West Pacific (SWP) HF frequencies from
the list!

h.    There appears to be no speed indications anywhere for a flight.  In
Airnav 3 this feature displayed in the Flight Management mode was really
useful to confirm that the times heard from listening to a HF position
report were entered into Airnav correctly by checking that the speed was
something realistic.

g.    On one of my computers running Windows XP Airnav 4 will not download
data from the internet.

The things I like about Airnav 4 are:

a.    the dynamic map,
b.    the display of waypoints, airports and flight routes, although the
program crashed when I displayed the flight routes and zoomed out,

The things I hate about Airnav 4 are:

a.    the database still sucks!!!!  I cannot think of a more restricted,
least accessible database known to aviation enthusiasts.  The concept of
only being able to edit a single entity is really outdated.  I want to be
able to remove hundreds of records from my Airnav database to speed up
performance, tailor the system to my needs and have control over which
database tools I use for the job.  As an example, the SW Pacific airlines
and aircraft are not particularly up to date so the add 8 Boeing 737s to the
Air New Zealand fleet in the Airnav database I have to do this one by one.
If I could use MS Access or a text delimited database I could block copy or
cut and paste repetitive data to ease the method of updating.  The same goes
for deleting records, why can I not select 20 records and delete them
without having to do it one by one?  The databse is the one BIG let down
that won't sell Airnav 4 to me.  I have expressed my dislike before on the
database issue but it sounds like my voice hasn't been heard (and I am sure
others feel the same way) and cheap and nasty solution has been used.

The product has been run with varying levels of reliabilty over the 30
minute trial period on the following two computers:

Pentium 2 300MHz 256 Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, trial versions of the Airnav
Selcal and ACARS decoders.

Pentium 4 1.6 GHz 256 Mb RAM, Widows XP, Airnav 4 standalone for internet
flight tracking (see above).

I am sorry but I will not pay for another Airnav despite it's appealing
nature and specky GUI.

Regards and good luck with the support issues as they arise.

Mike Jackson



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