FSACARs Problem

For some time I have been experiencing a problem with FSACARs. In all respects but one it seems to work well. The single problem I have involves recording longer flights (say 3 hours). FSACARs transmits reports every 15 minutes, but after an hour or two these transmissions abruptly stop. The program doesn't crash and there is no obvious external indication of a problem, but it just fails to record and transmit the rest of the flight.

Has anyone else had this problem? Does anyone know how to fix it?

Mike Daugherty
MSP Hub Manager
SPA 48

Hello Yoland - an interesting thing on your test flights...the indicated flight date is 7-15-2011 rather than the current date. I'm not sure how you managed that - as other fsacars entries are for current date (or within a day due to time zone difference). I'm guessing your test flights posted - but you won't see them unless you look back in your log to that date. Is your system date set correctly - or did you somehow change the date of flight in fsacars.

I don't think this is related to Mike's issue however.

John

Apparently FSACARS grabs the flight date from the sim program and not the computer system's date. That makes sense I guess. Multiflight will work - as it doesn't care what your flight date is - other than it might affect the weather and season and therefore your scenery you see might be vastly different than other fliers (just like setting your time at night - other pilots will fly about in bright sunshine while you're hoping for runway lighting).

Likewise - FSACARS doesn't care about the date - for SPA purposes anyway - other than how the flight date is recorded in the database - and the effects it would have on current pilot hours (so your flights will probably show in your log if you search back to July of 2011, but it if you were hoping to count it as a flight within the last 30 days you'd be out of luck without editing the flight log manually as site admin).

To return for a moment to the problem I've been having: I have been experiencing this on longer flights for some time (several years). I doubt it's related to my FSUIPC, as I just downloaded and reinstalled a new version. I see the problem by looking at the log FSACARS generates showing times and reports ... at some point these stop. I've wondered if it has anything to do with pausing or saving FSX, or with some sort of memory allocation limitation in FSACARs. I am currently using an unregistered version of FSCIPC, I wonder if that matters.

Mike

Yes...sorry Mike, didn't mean to hijack your thread.

Some things to consider:

Does fsacars remain working to the end - just no logging?

Are there any error messages or other abnormalities noted?

when you look at the log is there something unusual there?

is the last log entry the same each time it disconnects ie. the error occurs at the same point in the flight?

does it happen on all aircraft and all flight plans?

This might help narrow down - and like you said different actions within the simulator that could be cause. I've done a brief google on the subject, but didn't find an immediate match for your issue.

Registered versions are important for a lot of functionality - but in this case I would think it would be 'all or nothing' not intermittent working. Seems like an action you're taking or a conflict with another application is causing the problem.

I don't recall - but check to see if there is a debug/logging option in fsacars you can set so that you can see extra error messages - and check for this with simconnect and fsuipc also - as these logs might give you the source of the problem.

Just some thoughts off the cuff.

jr

Thanks jr, all good ideas. Since it takes a considerable investment in time just to get to the point where the anomaly occurs, it isn't easy to run multiple test cases. FSACARs appears to be working to the end, but just to stop logging. There are no error messages and the log thru the last point looks nominal. What I have not done is to correlate the point in the flight where the next log point should have occurred, but didn't, with other things going on at that point. I will keep some records going forward to see just when this happens (e.g., fixed time, or number of log entries, etc.) I will also log pauses and FSX save points to see if I can find a patterrn.

Mike.