Itra ActivePanel-Radio

By Andrew Herd (21 November 2001)

light Simulator has provided me with many thousands of hours of entertainment, but there are days when I really wonder why I bother. Most of those days are associated with IFR aviation and in particular with the problems of fiddling around with tiny little hotspots on radio panels. One second's inattention and you can tune the wrong frequency, resulting in all kinds of virtual grief. This is something that just doesn't happen in real life, unless you have particularly insensitive fingers. The trouble with Flight Simulator is that squeezing everything onto one screen results in some inevitable compromises and one of these is that simulated rotary controls just don't work as easily as they should. One way out of this situation would be for developers to design larger radio panels, but the trend has been to try and keep them "in scale" with the instruments. Result - bad navaid days.

I have read the occasional review of hardware add-ons for Flight Simulator and have managed to resist the siren call to spend money with the exception of a CH Products yoke and pedals, which was one of the best investments I ever made. The trouble with most of the products I have seen is that the build quality doesn't match up to their price and many of them rely on old serial port technology rather than USB, which completely rules them out as far as I am concerned. The writing is on the wall for the serial port and it will vanish from PCs before long. So when Itra GmbH suggested we reviewed their "activepanel" radio panel for Flight Simulator, my first response was lukewarm, but my feelings didn't stay that way for long.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the activepanel was the quality of the packaging; it took me a good five minutes to fight my way in to the inner box constaining the panel, which sat so snugly in its cardboard home I thought I would never get it out.

The activepanel is mounted in a folded steel box held together with cruciform screws and the general fit of the components was excellent. Included with the panel was a floppy, a manual in German and English, a power cable ending in a 2 pin plug (I used an electric razor adapter to connect it to my 3 pin system) and best of all, a USB cable to connect the device to the PC.

The front of the active panel has six displays: two com radios; two nav radios; an ADF; and a transponder. Each radio has a rotary knob for adjustment and an ident switch and on the far right of the box there is a three position switch which allows you to adjust lighting intensity.

Installation is very simple: put the floppy in the drive, follow the instructions to copy the drivers across to Windows and then plug the panel in. The only thing you have to do otherwise is to run a utility from control panel which copies a gauge across to each aircraft you want to use the panel with and my advice is that you might as well do it for all of them, because this is the most useful piece of hardware I have seen in a very long time.

The screenshot opposite shows me installing the activepanel radios to the default Cessna 182 and the procedure is pretty much foolproof. Once you have hunted through the aircraft folders to find the panel.cfg file, adding activepanel functionality is a simple matter of clicking the "add gauge" button and the software does the rest. This can actually be done with Flight Simulator running, as long as you don't have the aircraft you want to add already loaded in the sim, which means that if you suddenly decide you would like to fly a different plane with the panel you can set the plane up very quickly. Once the software has modified the aircraft's panel.cfg, the next time you load it you will be greeted with a new icon at top left of the Flight Simulator window, which is the only outward sign that the gauge which communicates with the activepanel hardware has loaded.

The icon is one of the very few things I don't particularly like about the activepanel, mostly because I like a completely clear forward view, but I am sure it won't bother the majority of users and in any case it can be dragged and dropped in a less obvious place. At this point it might be worth saying that the one reason it is worth having the icon there is that if the gauge isn't loaded, the active panel can't control the radios, so it is a constant reminder of the where you need to be in Flight Simulator to use the panel.

OK, enough of the software, what is the panel like to use? Well, the answer is - very nice indeed. As you can see from the screenshot, all the components are of very good quality. The numerals are actually much clearer than the screenshot suggests and I had no trouble reading them at all. The radios are laid out "horizontally" and I would have liked to see them arranged vertically as they are in most aircraft, but this is only a minor gripe. Many people will stick the activepanel under their monitor, but Itra say they can build a vertical case for about an extra 160 euros.

There is much more to the panel than meets the eye and the more I used it the more I grew to respect it. To adjust the radios you depress the knob until the standby light comes on (the far right red dot next to the letters STBY on the screenshot). After that, twisting the knob sets the pre-decimal figures - and a brief press of the knob allows you to tune the post decimal figures. If you now depress the knob again until the standby light goes out, the radio on the aircraft panel tunes to the frequency set on the activepanel. But the best of it is that the activepanel stores the previous frequency and next time you press the knob briefly, this frequency is recalled and can be passed to the aircraft radio with a two second press. In effect, the activepanel gives you dual switchable frequency radios, even for panels which don't cater for them and this makes all the difference flying IFR in FS2000. For example, you can fly a VOR based STAR and then flick in a stored ILS frequency precisely when you need it.

The ADF and the transponder work slightly differently to the Nav and Com radios. Here, each press of the knob switches the "active digit" one to the right, so that to set a frequency, you twist to set the first digit, press in to activate the second digit, twist to set that, press to activate the third and so on. Needless to say, if Flight Simulator is set up appropriately, the ADF will tune the fractional frequencies found on some European navaids, so there is no circumstance I can think of which these radios won't cover.

Com2 is not active in the default FS2000 setup, so if you use the standard activepanel gauge the panel display shows "---.--" But Itra have clearly thought long and hard about this, because hidden away in the folders installed on the disk is an alternative gauge which is one of the smartest pieces of thinking I have seen in a while. With this gauge installed, instead of the Com2 window uselessly displaying dashes, you can use it to control the OBS and ADF rings. This is pure magic, and once again, each time you press the knob you change instrument, while twisting the knob sets the bearing. It was when I discovered this that I fell in love with the activepanel and I am currently considering having a USB port installed in my forehead so that I can form a more meaningful relationship with it.

The developers tell me that the activepanel is future proof and that getting it to work with FS2002 is purely a matter of creating a new gauge, which will be done as soon as the appropriate SDK is released, so it is well worth considering if you are planning to expand your flight simulation setup.