Making PFC Twin Piston Quadrant Behave Like Turboprop

[westes]

Is there any trick I can use to make the PFC Twin Piston Quadrant behave like the Twin Turbine Quadrant, specifically to make reverse thrust enabled at the low end of the throttle scale?

[Pete Dowson]

Is there any trick I can use to make the PFC Twin Piston Quadrant behave like the Twin Turbine Quadrant, specifically to make reverse thrust enabled at the low end of the throttle scale?

The PFC.DLL cannot detect what quadrant you have connected -- there is no hardware mechanism for that. They are merely mechanically attached, not electrically.

If the turbo quadrant assignments are to your liking, just enable that quadrant so that it gets selected, then calibrate it as usual.

Alternatively, you can use one of the User-defined quadrant pages and define the levers to do whatever you want, calibrating each lever again there.

I did most of my development and testing only with a six lever (4-jet) quadrant, just because all levers were then always available.

Regards,

Pete

[westes]

This may be another "go read the manual" question, but how do I get the lower range of the throttle to go into the negative part of the throttle area, as would be appropriate for a turbine prop or jet engine in reverse?

[Pete Dowson]

This may be another "go read the manual" question, but how do I get the lower range of the throttle to go into the negative part of the throttle area, as would be appropriate for a turbine prop or jet engine in reverse?

If you select the turbo quadrant in PFC.dLL, the throttles there are already set to do that. There are 8 throttles, if you look at the list (a picture in the Doc). Four "ThrottleN" and four "ThrottleRN" (where N goes from 1 to 4). The "R" variety include an idle notch calibration and a reverse zone. If you are assigning a User Config you would need to find those in the drop-down lists, but simply assigning the appropriate turbo quad will give you the correct ones in any case.

Haven't you just gone and tried? I thought that would be the first thing you'd do when I said just to enable the turbo quad.

Pete

[westes]

I never could get the Twin Piston quadrant to behave like a turbine quadrant, even when I selected Turbine Quadrant. So I went out and purchased the PFC Turbine Quadrant (ouch, not cheap).

Can you explain what the middle settings for the calibration mean? I did read the documentation. The documentation for calibration of a quadrant simply refers you back to the calibration of the yoke section.

The behavior I see with the Turbine Quadrant installed and the Turbine Quadrant selected in software, is that the power behaves properly, but I cannot get the props to feather when I move them to the red feather section of the quadrant. I realize I must recalibrate but don't understand specifically how calibration of feather works. No amount of recalibration so far has succeeded in getting the feather control to work.

[Pete Dowson]

I never could get the Twin Piston quadrant to behave like a turbine quadrant, even when I selected Turbine Quadrant. So I went out and purchased the PFC Turbine Quadrant (ouch, not cheap).

Since there is no difference between them either electronically or programmatically -- they are only mechanical levers, with no identifcation readable in the firmware/software -- that was really an unnecessary expense unless you like tyo be totally realistic and also have positive "latches" for the "centred" idle points.

Whilst I had one of eachtype of quadrant for development, all the testing could have easily been done with just one 6-lever quadrant.

Can you explain what the middle settings for the calibration mean?

An ordinary lever has two points of intereset -- maximum and minimum. So for such levers that's all that needs calibrating. On levers which have three specific points of interest (eg max, idle, reverse or max, idle, feather, etc) then obviously calibration of the "centre" zone is needed. For the levers with latched/gated centres you need to calibrate that latch point with a defined area (just above, just below the gate), to allow for small variations in the pot reading.

Just follow the directions and it will work.

Pete