FMS Flight Simulator with CT6A Remote Control Transmitter – or T6A TX

FS-CT6A is a popular 6-channel RC TX, and is also a fabulous device to run a flight simulator on your home computer to get you trained before flying and crashing your real model plane. Here is the recipe. 

FMS: Get this freeware simulator. You can run it on a Windows inside a virtual machine if you use Linux. Both the 2.0 beta7 and 2.0 alpha8.5 should work. The alpha8.5 crashes more often on my setup.

PPJoy: This is a virtual joystick simulation software driver for windows. Get it and install. It creates virtual joysticks on a windows machine without a real joystick hardware.

T6sim: It’s a bridging software that receives inputs from your CT6A and feed it to PPJoy. Get this software zip package and unzip it.

Follow the instructions in the install.txt file in t6sim package directory. In PPJoy create a virtual joystick. You may need to reboot windows at this point. Run T6sim.exe, it will be minimized into the system tray. Right click on the systray icon to configure t6sim. Then calibrate t6sim, calibrate PPJoy, and calibrate Windows game device so that the CT6A TX sticks generate full range of actions in all the softwares. All the instructions are in the install.txt file from t6sim package, do follow it. Only one tip, when configuring Windows game device, choose test mode and show raw data, then move the sticks on your TX you should see the raw data changing between 0 and 120. If you see the data fixed at a big number, go back to verify configurations and calibrations in t6sim and PPJoy.

It a good idea to also program your TX to use the configuration coming with t6sim. See my previous post about how to program it. Get and save your previous configuration from the TX to a file, then load the T6_calibration.cfg in t6sim package and send it to your TX. This configuration sets all the sticks to their simple mode.

Now, start FMS, you’ll get trained before crashing your real model! Get trained on simulator is a vital step or else you’ll crash your real model a lot.

All the software mentioned above is collected at a github repository. To download a specific file, you click on the file, then click raw it should ask you to save the file.