VOR Range

1st Official Post

    Greetings.

    I have posed this question before but have not seen an answer. if I have missed a response i apologize. When will this be increased to reflect somewhere near real world range? The CDI gave no indication beyond 55-50 miles though the DME indication was present at longer ranges. Without having a gps with at least a "direct to" function this does detract from the experience for those who like to do their own navigation. This is a great sim and I have and will continue to support it by buying add-ons as they become available but as a real world pilot (retired) it would be great to have increased VOR reception range. Thanks for your consideration.

    Dave

    The VHF line of sight range from 30,000 feet might be 200 miles plus but the transmitter power won't go out that far, the maximum high power VORs will do a hundred miles plus but a minor hill in the way can blank reception and terrain will be a major factor lower down and lower power VORs will not carry anywhere near that far. One local VOR that I looked up in the national 'air pilot' had a published range of ten miles!

    Having dodgy reception at about sixty miles seems reasonable in a sim unless you are tuned to some special installation or are way high up. How could a VOR in Switzerland be modeled?, would it have range dependant on bearing and altitude? Perhaps coastal VORs could have longer ranges over the water?

    Less reliable NDB reception would be an improvement, they are subject to the long list of bearing and interference errors.

    Vor range can be 150+ miles if it is a high power airways VOR or should it be a lower powered terminal VOR is could be considerable less. Vor is line of sight. The way to determine range is the following formula: the square root of the height above the VOR station times 1.23. Example...the Vor is 1000' asl and an aircraft is flying at 11000' asl. The difference is 10000'. The square root of 10000 is 100...multiply by 1.23 and you come up with a possible range of 123 miles. As to mountainous areas check out the VOR near Eagle, Colorado.....DBL freq 113.0. It's on a mountain at 12000+'. In mountainous areas they are usually located up high. I flew for a living for 40 years till retiring a couple years ago. VOR range in Aerofly 2 is way below that in the real world. Please check this out with an aeronautical reference publication or someone that you trust.

    You add the separate range heights for that example unless the terrain remains near that mountain VOR's height all the way to the (near to the VOR) horizon. If the land between went down to mean sea level you would have 39 plus 129 miles line of sight.

    The long range VORs could do with a longer coverage, the national aeronautical information publication materials are available online so it isn't too hard to look them up. This is from the UK CAA's AIP. It shows how terrain limits the long range reception, ADN has a clear view to the east while BEL has a clear view to the west.

    (Later. The Swiss information is not freely available online.)

    Edited once, last by Overloaded (July 16, 2018 at 9:36 PM).

    I stand by my statement above. . As to what this UK chart suggests please read it again then compare to my post above. This chart above is for certain UK VOR stations only. All real world VOR stations are not restricted to ranges of less than 60 miles.

    If you choose to let thing stay as they are....well that is your choice. If I didn't care about this sim I would not spend my time bringing it to your attention.

    • Official Post

    No it can't be edited from the outside since it has to do with which parts of the sim are loaded. Not all world wide nav aids are loaded at once which would decrease performance.

    So the station might just not be loaded at all at 60NM distance, so we would need to change this first and then make sure it is not affecting the performance when the range of loaded nav-aids is higher. This is also affected by the square of the range increase, so twice the distance means 4x as much area and potentially 4x as many stations that need to be simulated.

    Thanks. Hope it happens. I'm a retired RW pilot (40 years) and I like your sim when I just want to go flying and enjoy the scenery and not get into the complexity of the P3d environment. For me the VOR range is the only thing detracting from the experience. I started flying back in the day where the VOR/DME/ADF was king and a GPS was a w@t dre@m. There was a rumor of something called NavStar back then that appeared a couple decades later as GPS. I flew lots with LORAN before GPS which was pretty cool in its day. Thank you for your consideration as a future improvement.

    Quote from Jet-Pack

    No it can't be edited from the outside since it has to do with which parts of the sim are loaded. Not all world wide nav aids are loaded at once which would decrease performance.

    So the station might just not be loaded at all at 60NM distance, so we would need to change this first and then make sure it is not affecting the performance when the range of loaded nav-aids is higher. This is also affected by the square of the range increase, so twice the distance means 4x as much area and potentially 4x as many stations that need to be simulated.

    Should we work on the basis that any VOR more than around 50nm away will not register whatever the terrain? I also like to do my own navigation and I just encountered this problem midflight. There was another VOR closer but less convenient to use so if 50nm is the limit that's easy info to get from skyvector and I'll plan flights accordingly.