feathers
April 16th, 2004, 02:38 PM
All right, today was it for my tower tour extravaganza. I'm still gonna do write-ups of KLAX and KONT, and I have pictures from both (majority external shots for KLAX, almost all in-cab shots at KONT).
An interesting occurance while at KONT: They got a call from SoCal. And what happened? Well, the little button on the comm panel marked SCT started flashing green (or was it orange?) and... it rang. There was a single chime sound. And the ground/delivery controller (she was working both at the time) pressed the button and it turned green and she was connected to SoCal. I even got to hear the SoCal controller since she was using the external speaker instead of her headset.
It turns out the call was for the local controller, but when a line rings, it lights up on all panels that the line is connected to, so anyone can answer it (not unlike a PBX system). It makes me wonder if this would be a feasable feature in ASRC x.x somewhere in the future: To somehow make TWR, GND and DEL feel more like they're in the same room. Then again, if there isn't some really easy mode of communications (to approximate being able to look over at the other controller and talk to them face to face), you wouldn't want GND picking up TWR's calls... Something to think about, I guess.
Later she tried to call them back and punched the button but never got a reply (it rang but nobody answered?), so she released it. For those who are curious, the RLS button is in the star position of the 3x4 number keypad on the panel.
But the question is answered: For KONT (a Level-6 facility... it's a long, sad story...) and most probably also KLAX and KSAN (given they had the same style of voice comm panels), calls to and from the TRACON are most definitely interphone calls.
However, until the ringing-RLS bug is fixed, it would probably be best to keep with override calls for now. And trying to get some shortcuts for answering a line (.ans or .ans <cl>?) and maybe to place someone on hold (.hld or .hld <cl>?) would be nice for ASRC 1.2 as well.
See youse guys on the scopes.
James
P.S. I've seen a number of female controllers (although the ratio is still rather skewed toward male)... has anyone ever seen or heard any women on VATSIM? Seems like we're all guys around here.
An interesting occurance while at KONT: They got a call from SoCal. And what happened? Well, the little button on the comm panel marked SCT started flashing green (or was it orange?) and... it rang. There was a single chime sound. And the ground/delivery controller (she was working both at the time) pressed the button and it turned green and she was connected to SoCal. I even got to hear the SoCal controller since she was using the external speaker instead of her headset.
It turns out the call was for the local controller, but when a line rings, it lights up on all panels that the line is connected to, so anyone can answer it (not unlike a PBX system). It makes me wonder if this would be a feasable feature in ASRC x.x somewhere in the future: To somehow make TWR, GND and DEL feel more like they're in the same room. Then again, if there isn't some really easy mode of communications (to approximate being able to look over at the other controller and talk to them face to face), you wouldn't want GND picking up TWR's calls... Something to think about, I guess.
Later she tried to call them back and punched the button but never got a reply (it rang but nobody answered?), so she released it. For those who are curious, the RLS button is in the star position of the 3x4 number keypad on the panel.
But the question is answered: For KONT (a Level-6 facility... it's a long, sad story...) and most probably also KLAX and KSAN (given they had the same style of voice comm panels), calls to and from the TRACON are most definitely interphone calls.
However, until the ringing-RLS bug is fixed, it would probably be best to keep with override calls for now. And trying to get some shortcuts for answering a line (.ans or .ans <cl>?) and maybe to place someone on hold (.hld or .hld <cl>?) would be nice for ASRC 1.2 as well.
See youse guys on the scopes.
James
P.S. I've seen a number of female controllers (although the ratio is still rather skewed toward male)... has anyone ever seen or heard any women on VATSIM? Seems like we're all guys around here.