Author Archives: ballen

Firstly the FsHub team would like to wish you and your families a very happy new year and best wishes for 2022!

I also have a few final updates and other bits to let you know about before we roll into 2022 that I’m pleased to share with you…

LRM 5.1.2 has been released!

Today we have released LRM 5.1.2 and have pushed the “auto-update alert” to all user’s that have the “Check for updates” enabled – this new release sees various improvements and depending upon what version you’ve upgraded from (or will be upgrading from) you should notice a whole load of nice and new features including the new “Dark mode” that seems to have been very popular.

If you’re coming from a much older update (eg. v4.x.x) – Oh boy, you’re in for a treat and without me explaining all the new features in recent releases, you can check out the individual “release posts” here:

• LRM 5.0.0 specific features
• LRM 5.1.1 specific features

Other fixes and tweaks in this specific release (5.1.2) however include improvements to the simulator type detection and further general optimisations.

You can download the latest LRM client version from the official LRM website or use this direct link – simply run the installer to automatically upgrade your LRM client version!

Lapland 2021 event is closing but was a great success!

Our Lapland 2021 event is almost over, flights to Lapland after midnight on the 31st December 2021 (UTC) will no longer be counted and the achievement will not be applied to your account and so, if you wanted one last final chance to obtain this “special edition” achievement badge – be sure to get your aircraft airborne ASAP! – Full details and criteria can be found on the event details page.

Whilst we know that “achievements” and “events” aren’t for all our users, it has been great to see that as of now we have had over 70 pilots complete the achievement in just under two weeks, pilots have been flying in from all different parts of the world in various types of aircraft – it’s been great to see so many get involved and we’re pleased to say that it appears to have been a great success!

Thanks to all that got involved – recent pilot screenshots and flight reports from those that participated in the event can be viewed on the event details page.

New flight achievements now released!

We’ve been working hard behind the scenes to add numerous “global” (all-year-round) achievements into FsHub and we’ve done our best to cater for both airliner and GA pilots – this works in exactly the same way as our special “Lapland 2021” event with the exception that these new achievements can be obtained all throughout the year…

These new achievements are just the start of many other achievements to come (that we will be adding every few months) and we hope that the initial set of flight achievements will keep you guys busy for a while yet 🙂

Generally speaking, most of these achievements have some kind of “real-world back story” or theme to them, we hope you enjoy flying them and receiving your well-deserved badges upon completion!

You can now see the full list of the available achievements on your personal “My achievements” page – you can access this by clicking on the “View achievements” button on your pilot dashboard as shown here…

…whilst most (or all, if you didn’t participate in the Lapland event) will be “greyed out” – you can read about each achievement and the criteria for completion by simply clicking on each of the achievement badges.

Progress on FsHub updates

As you may recall from my last blog post, I’ve been busying finalising some major improvements to the FsHub website and can confirm that the website’s display of geotagged screenshots and major radar page updates are making great progress and by the end of next week, these new features should be released and fully available.

As a reminder – if you’ve not yet configured screenshot geo-tagging or are not sure what it is/how it works, please see this guide – whilst totally optional, it is super easy to set up and really will enhance your future flight reports going forwards:- https://docs.fshub.io/lrm/guides/screenshots_geotagging_in_lrm

Other than the above, in my last blog post, I also covered what will be worked on next and into the next few months – if you’re interested and didn’t see/read my last update, you can read it again here.

Have your say – participate in the December 2021 User Survey

If you’ve been following along and reading my blog posts over the last year you will be aware that the previous user surveys have been a great way for users to communicate what they do and don’t like in addition to what feature they want to see or how they generally feel FsHub should be improved – almost all user requests (where I have felt that these requests fall into what FsHub is/should do) have been implemented over the last twelve months – I take the user survey feedback very seriously and would like to invite you all once again to participate in this new survey to help shape the future direction of FsHub and/or provide general feedback (good or bad).

Please take a minute to complete the user survey to let me know that we’re on the right track 🙂

You can access the anonymous user survey here

That’s it from us for this year – have a great new year’s eve, keep your eyes peeled for new improvements that are released over the next two weeks and we’ll see you again very soon 🙂

As well as a few new things to announce in this blog post, the FsHub Support team (clorix and thunfischbaum) and I (ballen) would like to take this opportunity to personally wish you all a very happy and merry holiday season – we hope you have a fantastic break and manage to spend some quality time with your families!

As mentioned, I have a few other things to announce this week…

LRM 5.1.1 has been released!

This version of LRM includes several improvements and new features which are as follows:-

• A new “Dark Mode” has now been added to LRM client which can be enabled from the “Edit > Preferences” window – this is disabled by default!
• Pilots who use the virtual airline features and particularly the “Import a plan from a Company Route” can now type/filter the company route to auto-select it (no need to scroll through a ton of company flight plans)
• Improvements made to the VA stlying of the LRM client (text boxes and stat text now utilise the VA configured colour scheme too).
• A new EFB app (“Airline Radar”) has been added that enables you to launch your virtual airline radar (to only display other pilots in your virtual airline on the radar page)
• A new EFB app (“Route Plan”) has been added that will automatically open up the FsHub “My Flight Plan” page to enable easier cross referencing of waypoint and navaid frequencies/coordinates when programming your MCDU/GPS etc.

You can download this release (LRM 5.1.1) from the main LRM client website now: https://lrmclient.org or by using this direct link!

Simply download and run the installer – the upgrade will be automatic!

Screenshots of changes and new features in this release can be seen here:

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We are aware of an issue at the moment where the EFB does not correctly load if you have configured LRM to auto-start when you login aka. “BlackBox mode” (this has been an issue since we first released the EFB features) – but rest assured this will be fixed in the new year, if you wish to use the EFB and are currently running LRM in “BlackBox mode” we recommend disabling BlackBox mode for now and starting the client manually – you won’t experience any issues that way!

Lapland 2021 event

With only a few days left until the end of the month, I would just like to remind all pilots that they have until the 31st of December to achieve this special “one-time” achievement and gain the “Lapland 2021” badge for their profile.

As a reminder, the achievement details and criteria can be found on the achievements page (along with the list of pilots who have already completed the achievement, their screenshots and the associated flight plans) here.

If you’re considering taking part in the event and would like details of how to get freeware of payware scenery for the airport itself, links can be found on the original event blog post.

So far we have had over 50 pilots complete the event – it has been great to see so many festive liveries used too; surrodox2001 even completed the achievement in a Concorde 🙂 and most pilots who have participated in the event posted some amazing screenshots so far, here are just a few of them (for your viewing pleasure)…

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What’s next on the list of things to do for FsHub/LRM client?

As well as several other little tweaks and improvements to FsHub over the last three weeks, which some of you may have already noticed, I’m going to take a couple of days off and spend some time with my family but improvements that will be worked on next are as follows:-

• Finally make use of the new Screenshot Geotagged data – I’ve been super busy with other user requests and changes recently which has meant that I’ve not yet had the time to finish off the displaying of geotagged screenshots on the FsHub site (flight map pins, airport “screenshots” features and the ability to search for screenshots in areas of the world etc) but this will be prioritised after the christmas break – I personally cannot wait to have this completed and be able to see and search for screenshots in various parts of the world or along my flight path – it’ll be great!
• Major improvements to the Radar page – you will be able to instantly see information about all flights/pilot details instead of having to wait several seconds for information to populate in addition to displaying the “already flown path” for each aircraft. A listing of all flights with flight plans will also be available. Clicking on a new button on the pilot profile page “Show on Radar” will automatically launch the radar page and select the pilot on the radar too!
• Pilot stats page – this is actually already 50% completed and already includes various graphs and charts but I do however want to add more features and charts and so it’ll be a month or so before this is fully completed and released but it is on it’s way!
• Further airport and navdata improvements.
• Adding a new instant messaging and “NOTAM” system for virtual airlines so they can keep in touch with other “company” pilots through the EFB and FsHub website – we *may* roll this out to everyone (personal users too) if pilots would like the ability to add “friends” and chat with them in real-time/get notifications when they are online etc – Not sure how people feel about this though so I will hold off making any decissions until I get feedback from other pilots!

Once the above is completed, I feel that FsHub will feel more complete and having added every feature that pilots of whom have completed the various “Pilot Surveys” throughout this past year I guess the next logical things for me to work on are as follows:

• Documentation!!! – We have created a new documentation site at: https://docs.fshub.io but it’s pretty sparse at the moment as I’ve just been so busy with coding etc but this will get some special attention very soon!
• More apps and improvements to the new Electronic Flight Bag system – improving the live GPS viewer will be one of the first tasks – we’ll be switching to vector based maps for a crisper look!
• A fully overhauled LRM client (v6) seeing a completely fresh and clean client “borderless” interface that can be run on MacOSX and Linux too! – This will be a long project and will take several months (possibily six months) to develop and test fully.

In the new year, I will publish a new User Survey which I invite you to all participate in – I want to know if you guys are happy with the recent improvements and features and maybe if there are certain things you would like to see in the near future too.

New achievements coming in January!

With the recent “Pilot achievement” system that we implemented this month, we have, up until now only added a single achievement (special event) to the system which is the “Lapland 2021” event.

Work is happening behind the scenes by Clorix and thunfischbaum to add many more “global” (all year round) achievements which will be available for pilots to complete and achieve from early January (if they want to participate – no pressure if achievements/badges aren’t your “cup of tea”).

A very special thanks to you guys…

I just wanted to thank (once again) all you generous pilots out there who have donated to the project this year and have helped relieve some of the hosting cost pressure from me; I would like to say an extra special thanks to John Gould, Jackson Strand, Charles Nadeau, Beefloh and Felix Richter for their continued support on Patreon (your monthly support alone helps pay for two of the five servers that make up our Kubernetes cluster that runs the FsHub platform – thank you so much for that!!) and to those pilots of whom have made one-off donations this year by PayPal too – thank you guys so much!

The pilots over at CIVA (Virtual airline) and SimPlanet (Virtual airline) have also recently sent over a few donations in the last week or so too – again, thank you!

We’d also like to thank and show our appreciation to our “Test Pilots” over on our Discord server of whom help us test releases and provide valuable feedback – Thanks guys, you do a fantastic job!

Well, that’s it from us for this blog post – again, we hope you have a fantastic holiday season and as always, please feel free to feed any comments or requests to us either on our Discord server, forums or by sending us a message using our contact form.

From myself (ballen), Cody (clorix) and Uwe (thunfischbaum) – Have a great Christmas and we’ll see you back again in a few days 🙂 – As you might expect though, we’ll be on hand for any support issues in Discord, emails or the forums if you need us – even on Christmas day 🙂

Ahead of the Christmas period and with the recent release of Rovaniemi (EFRO) by MK-Studios I decided to build in a new “achievement” system into FsHub this week of which is capable of time-based “events” as well as global (all year round) pilot achievement flights in addition to “grouped” (multi-leg/multi-achievement) achievements.

This is our first-ever “event” and pilot obtainable achievement on FsHub and hopefully the first of many…

This particular achievement (event) is “time-bound” and as such, FsHub users who would like to obtain this “special edition” achievement must complete the achievement between Saturday 18th and Friday the 31st of December 2021.

Let us tell you a little more about Lapland and Rovaniemi airport (EFRO)…

Lapland is Finland’s northernmost region, a sparsely populated area bordering Sweden, Norway, Russia and the Baltic Sea. It’s known for its vast subarctic wilderness, ski resorts and natural phenomena including the midnight sun and the Northern Lights. Capital Rovaniemi is the gateway to the region. The homeland of the indigenous Sami people, which extends into neighboring countries, centers on the far north. 

Rovaniemi is known for Santa Claus Village and Santa Park which is located near the airport as well as very cold winters and demanding weather conditions.

Rovaniemi (EFRO) airport is located in northern Finland and serves the local town as well as the local Christmas tourist attractions commonly known as “Lapland”.

Many European airlines fly young families up to Rovaniemi in December to see “Santa Claus” but flights by Finnair are carried out to and from Helsinki all year round too.

Rovaniemen Airport is the third busiest airport in Finland, located about 10 kilometres (6nm) from the city centre and a fun fact… the Arctic Circle crosses the airport runway at its northern end!

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In return for participating in the event, all FsHub users will receive a special edition emblem on their pilot profile for having taken part.

The details of your flight, any screenshots you take and your pilot details will then appear along with the other participants on the “event” details page.

How do you participate in the event? – You can quite simply visit the achievement details page, read the details and in particular, ensure that your flight adheres to the “criteria” section (for this particular event you simply need to fly to and land at the airport (from any airport of your choice) but you must ensure that your flight distance is greater than 80nm – there is no restriction on the aircraft type either).

Upon completion of the flight, you will automatically obtain the special edition emblem which will appear on your public pilot profile which you can proudly show off!

In preparation for this event, I have uploaded a bunch of official charts to the airport information page which can be added to your flight case (and viewed through the new AeroPad EFB that we released in LRM v5) for the event and can be found here.

Want to grab some custom scenery files? For MSFS users, there is a fantastic freeware scenery pack over at Flightsim.to. X-Plane 11 users can take a look at this free scenery pack that I found too. Personally, I think I’ll be grabbing a copy of the new MK-Studio’s payware airport as it looks amazing!

Updated: An FsHub user (CoderDede) has also contacted us with a link to download the scenery for P3D users too, you can grab it here: https://files.fsnordic.net/rovaniemi-efro-revisited-version-3

As always, It would be amazing if all participants could take screenshots at the airport or on approach and share (by uploading to their flight report) so they will automatically be included in the Event details page’s screenshots section.

If you have any questions about the event or want to know more about what we have planned for the new achievements’ system, please drop by our Discord server!

We hope to see you in Lapland very soon!

Following several weeks of hard work and long hours, we are finally pleased to announce the official release of LRM v5!

The release was slightly delayed by some last-minute feature additions and further testing (as we wanted to be sure that you didn’t have any issues when installing and using the latest version) so apologies for that!

LRM v5 has, without a doubt the biggest number of improvements and optional new features since 2017 – it is also the most tested release and we are confident that you will share our excitement and enjoy this particular version as much as we do!

This new version of the client has many new features that can be enabled (the majority of them are disabled by default for the simple fact that we feel you should explore at your own pace); some of my personal favourites however are:

• Screenshot Geotagging – FsHub has always provided free and unlimited screenshot storage space for all users and we are most definitely fans of taking a ton of screenshots during our flights and so, we decided to take screenshots to the next level by enabling users to setup automatic screenshot geotagging, which, when your screenshots are uploaded to FsHub can now be displayed on your flight report map as well.
  
• AeroPad (our very own integrated Electronic Flight Bag) which can be accessed through a browser on your flight simulator computer or any other network-connected device (we specifically built it to function on iPads and Android tablets but will work in any browser too!)
  AeroPad comes with a handful of “apps” out of the box including a real-time GPS/”moving map” app with integrated airport lookup facility, Charts Browser, Cabin Manager (for playing a whole host of fully customisable (per-aircraft livery) cabin annoucement messages), METAR Services to retrieve and display real-world weather reports and a couple of other, less interesting apps!
  
• A fully customisble cabin annoucement system that can be configured on a per aircraft and aircraft livery basis through the LRM interface (no more copying and replacing sound files manually or listening to my voice giving you the instructions as to how to achieve the pushback and arrivial messages :D).
  
• You can now “sync” your airport charts from your FsHub flight case directly to your computer using the new “Chart Sync” screen which then enables you to filter and view these charts on the AeroPad EFB.
  
• You can tweak the landing rate score parameters on a per-aircraft basis (if you don’t like the default LRM values), you can also disabled the “G-force” calculation too if you’d prefer to just see your landing score based on the “FPM” value.
  
• A built-in METAR and TAF report tool that you can use directly from the LRM client interface – providing real-world METAR and TAF reports.
  
• You can enable a new feature called “Landing rate logbook” which can store basic landing rate details to a CSV file on your local computer – this obviously isn’t essential if you use FsHub as FsHub’s metrics on your flight are far superior.
  
• The “LRM Data Connector” – This feature enables developers to build apps in any programming language of their choice and gain access to the aircraft’s flight data in real-time locally (on the same computer as your flight sim) or on other devices on the same network (that is, if you allow it through your computer’s firewall) – our new EFB uses the “LRM Data Connector” behind the scenes too which makes being able to run our EFB remotely on a tablet device possible! As a developer, the possibilities of using this new feature are endless and hopefully others will use the data connector to build all kinds of apps and services (and hopefully share with our community too :)) – I’m especially exicited for this!
  
• The ability to build HTML/JS “apps” for AeroPad – If you know HTML/JS you can easily build and share apps that users can “install” into their AeroPad – documentation on this is coming soon but it’s much easier than you think and app developers get access to a set of REST API endpoints that they can access all kinds of data and use in their apps however they like… app developers can also query external API’s too if they wish! We will release a few “simple” apps for AeroPad very soon that will give you “one-click” access to other popular sites like SimBrief, RouteFinder, FuelPlanner.com and for those that like using AirCharts or ChartFox… they’ll be coming too (although you’d get a better expereience and native feel if you downloaded and used the new Chart Browser feature that is provided out of the box ;))

Various other tweaks and improvements have been added too, such as:

• A warning/user confirmation prompt when closing LRM client if your aircraft is mid-flight or is yet to send the final flight report back to FsHub (this should prevent you from accidently closing your simulator and losing flight data).
  
• It’s now much easier to link LRM to your FsHub account – you can use the new “Link my account” button in the preferences window (instead of having to generate, copy and paste an API key from FsHub.
  
• The majority of the AeroPad apps are “airline aware” and will automatically style based on the “active” virtual airline’s colour scheme/logo (if you don’t use Virtual airlines in FsHub, the default style will be applied as you might expect).

We’ve also been working hard to document these new features on our brand new documentation site. To make things easier, once you install the client you will find various “tip” links to help you get started with the new features (that is, if you intend on using them of course) you will however still feel right at home with the main interface as it looks and functions the same (we know from the user survey that our users liked the simplicity of LRM and FsHub!) – we’re still working on the documentation for now but the majority of the new features are fully documented already so should help you get started, rest assured though that these documents will continue to be worked on over the next few days! Everything, in all honesty, should be pretty self-explanatory anyway so please, fear not!

As a reminder, these new features are entirely optional and should you choose not to enable them, LRM will work as it did previously but with some added protection against you accidentally closing LRM mid-flight (this will now prompt and ask you to confirm).

We highly recommend all users upgrade to LRM v5 regardless of if they choose to enable and use the new features or not as various other changes and under the hood improvements have been made of which, in the future, may prevent older versions of the LRM client from functioning correctly (such as SSL configuration updates and dependency updates etc).

Would you like to upgrade now?

You can download the LRM v5 release now using this link!

The LRM website (lrmclient.org) will also be updated soon with new screenshots, an updated feature listing and updated links to the documentation but we are keen to get this new version in the hands of our most active users as we know the release has already been delayed by a couple of days!

The launch event livery pack!

To mark the official release of LRM v5 and LRM’s 8th birthday that is just a few days away – thunfischbaum has created three exclusive ” v5 launch event” liveries specifically for X-Plane users (sorry MSFS folk – he doesn’t own a copy of that, unfortunately)…

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The pack contains the “FsHub” livery for The Toliss A321, Toliss A21N and the IXEG B773, you can download these liveries using the links below:

• Download Toliss A21N “FsHub” Livery
• Download Toliss A321 “FsHub” Livery download
• Download IXEG B733 “FsHub” Livery download

A special thanks to the team!

I would like to personally thank Clorix and thunfischbaum from the FsHub Support team – they’ve been doing a lot of testing for me during the development phase, I’ve been throwing releases at them every day for about a week now (and every few days prior to that :)) and their feedback and capturing issues and reporting back in a timely fashion has been great!

In addition to the support team, we also have a group of “Test pilots” (namely Phil, Ryan, CIVA006/Vernon, Caspey1UK and Alex 002) over at our Discord server of whom have tested a number of releases recently too and their feedback and reporting of issues has been much appreciated too!

Thank you guys – I have really appreciated your help and support as doing this alone would have taken so much longer!

Feedback is always welcome and we would love to hear from you!

If you do (or don’t) like anything in particular or have issues with any of the new features (or LRM in general), as always, you can use our Community forums, our Discord server or send us a personal message as we’d love to hear from you!

If you don’t think something is working with the latest version of LRM or you think you found a bug, it probably goes without saying but please do report it to us using any of the support channels mentioned above and we’ll be quick to investigate and provide a solution!

What’s next?

Obviously, in the event of any issues found and reported with LRM v5, these will be fixed and an update provided as soon as possible but and as per our extensive testing, this time around I would be surprised if this was the case and therefore, these are the next things on my “to-do” list…

Between now and Christmas, now that LRM v5 has officially been released, my plan is to do further improvements to the main FsHub site (cleaning it up, refining some of the pages and generally improving the user experience of the site (pre-load thumbnails etc.) – no drastic changes just giving it a bit of “TLC”.

There will also be more navaid and airport data updates too that will happen behind the scenes – this is something that I’m working on getting fully automated and including even more data such as airways, SID’s and STARs (for those that use the flight plan features in FsHub.

Probably the biggest major feature that I have planned to add to FsHub in the next few weeks will be related to the new Screenshot Geotagging features that have been added in LRM v5…. At the moment, (if you enable Screenshot Geotagging in LRM and you choose to upload these screenshots to FsHub) the data is processed and stored in our database but the FsHub website has not yet been updated to display this new data and so, I will be adding some nice “dropdown” geo-location overlays (containing such information as the name of the town/city the screenshot was taken near, altitude, heading and placing the aircraft on a small map so you can see exactly where it was taken), I will also be using the screenshot metadata to add to a new “Screenshots” tab that appears in the Airport Information pages on FsHub (will show screenshots that was taken of aircraft on the ground at a particular airport) in addition to building a new page where users can search for screenshots in a certain area (dragging a box over a map etc – I think this will be pretty cool!)

Although the new EFB (AeroPad) is web-based (but running from your computer) and enables network access to it from tablet devices (you can even add an icon to launch it on your iPad or Android home screen), if there is big interest for me to build a dedicated (native) iPad and Android tablet app then I will start working on that too… In the end, I decided that a “web-based” EFB would be more flexible especially for those users that like to use a laptop instead of a tablet device.

Some minor updates to the Radar page and web GPS pages too – clicking on an aircraft will display the path already flown – previously this wasn’t persistent and would only show the path flown since clicking on the aircraft (as does the Web GPS page)- I will be working to make these paths persistent though and think that although this is a non-critical update, I think it will be a nice little touch!

In other news, we’ve also contacted SimBrief to see if we can obtain an API key from them – this will enable us to build an automatic route calculator directly into FsHub and potentially the new AeroPad EFB for those users that use the Route Plan features (but we’re still awaiting a response at the moment and yet to look into the finer details (terms and conditions of using it etc).

Are we missing anything?

I feel now that I have implemented and released everything that has been requested on the recent user surveys – with the exception of an LRM client for MacOS (which is something I’ll be looking into very soon however!!)

But, please, do let me know if you think we’re missing anything if you would like to see something added (that you feel fits the genre of what FsHub is) please contact us!

Having issues after upgrading?

We understand that people are using many different versions of LRM (even back as far as five years ago) and as we’ve not been able to test the upgrade path for all versions (as we’re only a very small team), we have made big improvements to the “uninstaller” (of all things :D) to ensure that in the event of any upgrade issues, users can simply uninstall and re-install it – this will force a completely clean install which should be 100% error-free!

So please keep this in mind… if you have issues after upgrading LRM to version 5 (likely due to the fact you are on a very old version), please uninstall and re-install LRM v5 – LRM v5 will then perform a fully fresh installation!

Good afternoon and for those who celebrate ThanksGiving – I hope you all had a fantastic day of celebrations yesterday and for everyone else, I hope you have all managed to grab a few bargains in the Black Friday sales!

I have a great Black Friday deal for you too… (you’ll have to wait a few more days) but the best part is, is that it is totally free of charge! 🙂

Bad dad jokes aside, I am super excited to announce that for the last four weeks (consisting of many, many long hours of development and test time) that LRM Client v5 is now in the final stages of internal beta testing (by myself, the FsHub support team and our “Test Pilot” group over on our Discord server) and is due to be released on December 1st 2021!

I would personally like to thank the following FsHub users for their testing and feedback to me Caspy1Uk, Phil, vchristie/CIVA006 and Ryan ensuring that I have been able to fix up any issues during the BETA phase and have them retest.

I would also like to make a special mention to my close team members – clorix and thunfischbaum of whom have been doing extra testing and helping with other aspects of this particular release.

LRM v5 builds upon the solid foundations of LRM v4 and the versions prior to that, the client has been further optimised and various optional, new (and in my opinion, game-changing) features have been added (but disabled by default – you can choose if and what new features you would like to use) hopefully all of them though!

** I WILL POST SOME SCREENSHOTS UP OVER THE WEEKEND, SO IF YOU’RE SUPER EXCITED AND WANT TO SEE WHAT’S COMING, COME BACK AND VISIT THIS POST AGAIN SHORTLY! **

Although the main LRM client look and feel remains the same – a sleek, simple and totally “not getting in your way” interface, as per the user survey (users feeding back that they love how lightweight and unobtrusive it is) – I want to reiterate that these features are completely optional and unless you enable them from the “Preferences” window, the client will continue to run as it always has done – a super lightweight and easy to use ACARS client.

There are however several new features (which, if you’re worried about performance at all… during testing, with all new features enabled, the LRM typically only consumes up to a maximum of an additional 10MB of RAM) – Taking LRM client’s total memory footprint up to about 25-30MB of RAM in total…. which is insane given the new features that have been added and especially when compared to other products that compete with LRM/FsHub!

Here is a quick high-level list of new features and improvements which you can expect from LRM v5 (being released on December 1st):-

• The EFB – Using the new “data connector” feature that is baked into LRM (again, fully optional and must be enabled through the preferences window) that I developed for LRM v5, has enabled me to develop the EFB system which can now be installed and/or viewed remotely on your main simulator PC or any other network connected computer or tablet/mobile device in your home. The EFB comes with a bunch of apps out of the box including a live GPS app (yes, realtime) and ability to view and navigate airport gates and taxiways with ease, view your airport charts, get airport information and weather reports! The EFB is also “duty airline aware” and can automatically change it’s style/logo to match your “active” virtual airline’s branding (if you use Virtual airlines and your FsHub VA owner has set custom branding up!).
• Screenshot geotagging – You can now configure LRM to “watch” a screenshot folder on your computer and whilst you are flying, if LRM detects any new screenshots having been taken it will automatically tag them with your aircraft’s position, speed and altitude, which, if you choose to then upload any of these screenshots to your flight report on FsHub, FsHub will display where your screenshot was taken on the flight report map and present information about the screenshot (speed, alt and location -nearest city or airport name) in a details panel. Although I could have added the ability to have LRM automatically upload these screenshots to your FsHub account I understand that most users like to edit their screenshots first!
• Ability to customise landing score parameters for specific aircrafts (maybe you don’t agree with the default FPM and G-Force limits that determine the LRM Client “Landing score”) – you can configure specific setting through the a new “Aircraft Manager” window otherwise LRM will continue to use the default settings.
• Ability to set a tail number for specific aircraft liveries (and have them sent to FsHub with your flight reports) – Enabling you to filter and group “multi-leg” flights such as “Around the world tours” or on the new “pilot stats” page, be able to see which (very specific) aircraft you fly the most.
• Easily add and customise a whole host of cabin sound effects through a new “Aircraft Manager” window, the Aircraft Manager interface also has options to “Export” and “Import” packs so you can share with your friends or VA members.
• Using one of our core EFB apps that is included in LRM v5 (that I have called Cabin Manager) you can remotely play any of the cabin sound effects that you have configured for the current aircraft (such as boarding music, safety annoucements, seat belt signs, prepare for landing etc from a seperate tablet/computer device) – You can setup custom cabin sounds for different airlines/aircraft with total ease!
• Ability to sync your collected “My flight case” airport charts to your computer and view them through the new EFB (or any other apps that you may install or develop in future).
• Retrieve real-world METAR and TAF reports directly from LRM Client.
• A new “LRM Data Connector” feature, which, if you enable it will allow other third-party applications running on your computer or your home network to retrieve data about your current flight, active duty airline, aircrarft and other aircraft position infomration (nearby airports etc) through a standard JSON REST API enabling for endless possibilities for developers to build amazing applications that can be used with ease with LRM client. – I could talk for hours on what this means for developers and other tools/apps that can be developed, this really does open up endless possibilities!
• A simple to use plugin/app system for the EFB enabling pilots, developers and virtual airlines to create their own “apps” using HTML and Javascript that can be installed into the EFB through our own free “App store” (i’m working on that documenation at the moment)
• Users who choose to use LRM Client offline (you can enable this too if you fly on FsHub also) can use an new “Landing rate logbook” which, when your aircraft lands, will store basic landing rate details to a file (CSV) on your computer which you can either open through the LRM client or using a tool such as Microsoft Excel.

In addition to these new features, further updates and optimisations have been made as follows:-

• Adding a pilot token to LRM Client is now fully automated with the use of a “Login” box – you no longer have to generate, copy and paste an API token from FsHub into LRM client as it’s now fully auomtated!
• Better prevention against users being able to accidently close LRM (and thus leading to loss of flight data) – LRM will now warn and ask for you to confirm closing the application if your aircraft is airborne or yet to send the final flight report.
• Discord Integration – If you link your LRM client to FsHub and fly online, your current flight details (location, elapsed flight time, speed, altitude and tail number or, your flight number, departure and arrival airort if you use flight plans) can be presented on Discord (if you’re running and logged into Discord, this can optionally be disabled if you don’t want your boss seeing you fly when you should be working :D)
• Users now have the ability to “force” a new flight from the “Help > Advanced” menu (if, for whatever reason they feel they want or need to do that – LRM is pretty good at figuring this bit out auromatically for you ;))

In addition to these features and improvements, the new data that is provided by the Screenshot Geotagging feature will enable me to make some amazing new features to FsHub (assuming you like flight simulator screenshots that is :D) such as the ability to display screenshots on the airport information pages (a new tab called “Screenshots” has recently been added) – these will display screenshots that had been taken at that airport (on the ground) or within close proximity to that airport – enabling users to “scout” out airports and the surround area’s before they decided to fly in. I also have plans to add a new “area drag” search feature to FsHub whereby, you can drag your mouse over the world map (creating a circular search area) and FsHub will return back all screenshots taken in that area!

For plugin developers and/or power users:- With the addition of the new LRM Data Connector (REST API) and EFB plugin system, I will be working hard on documentation leading up to the 1st of December release date with full API endpoint details a ton of example code and guidance as to how to build and share EFB apps or external apps (in your programming language of choice) and how to share with the LRM/FsHub community.

This post could go on for ages as I’m so excited about the new (again, fully optional and disabled by default) features that are coming in version 5 and especially the new “Data Connector” but I appreciate that you guys probably won’t find this as cool (geeky) as me so I’ll rein it in for now 😉

In the next update to LRM (5.1.0), I plan to have real-world weather overlays added to the EFB Live GPS map too, this specific release has turned out to be pretty major and I have to stop adding features at some point and let you guys play with it 😀

For now, though, I wanted to share progress and let you know what we have in store for you and we cannot wait to release this new version in just a matter of days now!

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns you can contact us on our Discord Server, our community forums or send me a private message using the FsHub Contact form page.

I wish you guys a great weekend and I will look forward to updating you with further information soon!

Appreciate the work that I do and haven’t donated as yet? If you fancied it, you can donate here – all donations go towards the hosting bills but rest assured that this does do me a massive favour as it means that I might not have to dig into my own pocket for the hosting bills this month 🙂

Hey, I hope you’re all well?

I wanted to post up another update post to let you all know about more updates and changes to FsHub again this month.

Following the recent user survey, I have taken on board your requests and feedback and am pleased to announce and demonstrate various new features that have been released in the last couple of weeks and are accessible now.

I guess *most* features have now been added into FsHub/LRM client as the number of responses to the User Survey this time around was significantly lower than the last two user surveys – I guess I should take this as a sign that generally users are happy/content with the features that now exist (have been added in the last year) but remember – if you think we are missing a feature or want to make a suggestion, please contact us!

Anyway, on with the list of updates and improvements that have been made over the last couple of weeks…

MSFS 2020 airport database update

As of today, I have now “merged” our existing airport database of which has been a labour of love since I originally started FsHub back in 2016 with the latest airports that can be found in MSFS2020 and which didn’t already exist in our database – this has been a requested feature/improvement that was voiced in the user survey recently.

I’m so pleased this process is over – this was one feature/improvement that I was not looking forward to (as I know how much time it consumes to do it properly) and to say that I have spent MANY hours working on these new merge scripts and testing would be an understatement 😉

With the merge now completed, this now sees the inclusion of an additional 10,709 airports and 23,350 runways – Wow, I honestly didn’t think there would be so many new airports!!

Going forwards, this should be much easier now as I have now developed a new “import processor” that will enable me to partially automate the “merging” of new airports every few months to ensure that our database remains up to date with those airports that appear in MSFS 2020!

In case you’re wondering what this means if you use XP11, P3D or another simulator… it simply means that our database supports more airports and this certainly will not break the experience for other users that are not using MSFS2020 so please don’t worry this won’t impact your experience and if anything will actually make it better!

LRM Client v4.3.2 is now released!

Earlier this month I released LRM Client 4.3.1 which came with a whole host of new features and performance optimisations but whilst this was released and passed our internal testing (and testing by our community of “Test Pilots” over on our Discord Server) it appeared that *some* users experienced issues with this release.

We initially found it hard to pinpoint what these issues were that affected a handful of our users but eventually (through the use of email and their bug reports) I was able to identify the issue as being a “regional setting” issue – essentially, it would seem that users in countries such as France (and other countries that Microsoft Windows would default decimal characters to a comma (,) instead of a dot/full-stop (.) would prevent the client from starting on their computers.

I have since added a fix for this situation that affects those users and as a result, have released LRM Client v4.3.2 which is available to download now from the LRM Client website.

There also appeared to be some users that experienced other issues with the client not running but these appear to have been resolved by the user adding an exception to their anti-virus system as their computer must have detected a false positive – this generally happens when new installers “hit the internet” that are not digitally signed (something that I don’t do due to cost implications) but over time, these non-signed applications are accepted by automated systems and Windows Defender/anti-virus systems then acknowledge them as being safe.

Ability to filter your logbook flights by country (not just ICAO code)

You may recall that recently I added the ability for pilots to filter their logbook entries and whilst users could choose a specific to/from ICAO airport code there wasn’t an easy way to filter all flights to or from a specific country (encompassing all airports in that country) well, that has now been added.

The logbook filter now supports the ability to search for flights to/from specific countries in addition to being able to specify specific airport ICAO codes 🙂 – I hope you enjoy this new feature!

Countries visited page now enables you to click on a flag…

As per the above new feature, by me implementing the new logbook filter option to filter flights by country it was then relatively easy for me to add the ability for users to now click on a “visited” flag from the “Countries visited” page to then automatically take them to a filtered list of the airports that they have visited.

Therefore, it is now possible when viewing the “Countries visited” page to click on a flag which will then automatically show a list of the airports visited within that country!

LRM Client website updates!

It’s been a while since the LRM Client website received much love from me… probably mainly due to the fact that LRM Client (v4.0.0) was stable for several years and changes that I had been making to FsHub didn’t require any LRM client changes but given all the recent new features (based on user suggestions or feedback) meant that I had to release newer versions of the client with more advanced features.

Up until now, however, the website remained with the same old screenshots from several years ago which didn’t accurately reflect all the new and advanced features that have been added to LRM and FsHub in recent months.

I have therefore updated all of the screenshots (and added more) as well as updated the list of features on the website too.

Feel free to check out the screenshots and page updates to see what’s now possible with LRM Client and FsHub – Personally, some of my new favourite features is the ability for Virtual Airlines to customise the LRM Client GUI interface (with their own colour scheme and logo) as well as being able to add “optional” flight route information either manually, imported from a “Virtual Airline Company Route” or from SimBrief and even LittleNavMap!

Improved FsHub homepage

It has been fun updating the FsHub homepage this last week, the homepage in recent years has been neglected a little as my time has been better spent adding and improving actual features of FsHub but I’m pleased to announce that I have made a few homepage updates recently and added video backgrounds.

Thanks to Cody (clorix) and Uwe (thunfischbaum) for supplying me with some video clips of their flights too.

The new FsHub homepage now has three random videos (one from each of us) that will play when you visit the site – ok, maybe not so interesting for you guys but I personally think the homepage now looks pretty awesome in comparison to the older static image 🙂

New “Flights by Simulator” stats on the platform stats page

This is an interesting new statistic that I’ve added today too – From the platform stats page, scroll to the bottom and you can now see the number of flights by simulator version (eg. MSFS2020, XP11, P3D, FSX etc).

This is a really good statistic (especially for me) as I can see how flights are flown with which simulators and as such will be able to help me make informed decisions and improvements in future 🙂

New exclusive features for FsHub donators

In addition to the above features, there are also some new “non-essential” features that I have added that are enabled for “supporters” of FsHub as my way of saying “thank you” to those people who help me out personally by helping me cover the hosting costs of running such a service.

The new features that are exclusively available to “Supporters” of FsHub are as follows:

• Supporters can export/download their entire logbook to a CSV/Excel file (from the Pilot Logbook screen) enabling them have an offline copy or use their own Excel (or Google Sheets) knowledge to generate charts and other such cool features! – Remember that if you’re not a supporter you can still use our API to download your logbook but this is a far easier way of grabbing the data and takes only a few seconds!
• The ability to update the landing rate (FPM and G-Force) for their flights using the “Edit flight” button on the flight report page.
• A new private Discord room for providing priority support and guidance (if you would like access to this room and have already donated please Contact Us with your Discord username and we’ll send the invite)

I’m sure you will all agree that whilst these features are “nice to haves” and that they certainly do not limit your experience of using FsHub (as a “free” user) and I am keen to ensure that the bulk of features are and remain free to all users but I wanted to provide some additional functionality to those who really do help me personally by ensuring that I don’t have to keep footing the hosting bills each month out of my own pocket!

I will also be adding some other small features for “Supporters” of FsHub overtime (when I can think of non-essential but worthwhile features that I think they would benefit from) but don’t worry – this is not a sign of things to come I just wanted to provide the very kind people that help me out with a few extra perks to make it more worth their while and to show my appreciation!

As a reminder, if you would like to help out and become a “supporter” of FsHub, you can find more details on the donations page.

Survery question: Why do we use FSUIPC?

One question that I want to address here as the original question was asked/feedback to me in the recent user survey was “Why do you still use FSUIPC and why not switch to SimConnect now that MSFS 2020 is out” and yet, the user (all submissions on the Google Forms are anonymous) did no voluntarily provide his or her email address for me to respond back to but, I can confirm as follows:

I continue to use FSUIPC in the LRM client software simply due to the fact that FsHub (and LRM client) aims to support and work with all major flight simulators – As you can see from the new “simulator” stats section on our “Platform Stats” page, there is a large number of X-Plane users too and X-Plane is a platform that I too love and want to ensure is supported for our community. If LRM client solely used SimConnect this would not be compatible with the likes of X-Plane and other users running older versions of FSX, FSX:SE and P3D could also be affected and, in my opinion, would give most people (except those running MSFS2020) a headache trying to install SimConnect correctly.

Whilst I could write separate clients for MSFS and X-Plane based clients and whilst this is something that I *may* do in future that will leverage their own APIs (eg. MSFS2020 would use SimConnect) and X-Plane would use the X-Plane DataRefs the truth of the matter is, is that I am the sole developer working on FsHub and LRM client and ensures that I do not have to maintain multiple versions of a client which would take my attention away from improving the core functionality of FsHub.

Reiterating that I will be keeping things simple and platform performance is the key!

Another thing that was evident from the user survey is that users of FsHub, whilst are enjoying the new features voiced their opinion that, one of the main reasons why they love FsHub is the simple and non-cluttered interface and experience that it provides to users.

This is something that I have always been keen on keeping and I want to reassure users that simplicity (from a users’ perspective at least) and speed and stability of the platform is my top priority and so you guys need not worry!

Scheduled outage for FsHub Forums and the Blog this week!

On Wednesday 27th October between the hours of 08:00 and 16:00 (UK time) I will be performing maintenance on the servers that host the FsHub forums and blog site, this process could take up to 8 hours.

The main FsHub platform, LRM client website and our discord servers will remain online during this process and will not be affected – it’s just the blog and forums that will be affected during this time window.

Remember that all outages planned or not are always reflected on our Status page.

Would you like to feedback on anything or ask questions regarding this update?

If you would like to provide feedback or ask any questions with regards to this update specifically and instead of me opening up another Google Forms survey, I have created a new thread in our official forums which you can reply to – I will then read and respond accordingly 🙂

As you may have noticed, there have been a few minor updates to FsHub this week, one of which is the new video background on the homepage (if you haven’t seen it yet, please go and check it out – you may have to refresh your browser cache if it doesn’t immediately show up!

With so many people uploading amazing screenshots to FsHub (which are visible on both flight reports and in our discord server), I thought it might be nice to involve the community too in helping to create a number of short intro sequences for the FsHub homepage – the idea being that one of these video sequences will be randomly shown when someone visits the FsHhub homepage.

So, what am I after and how can you get involved?

Well, if you are using MSFS 2020, XP11 or later versions of P3D (the quality of other simulators like FSX etc is just too outdated though for the video quality that I’m after) and, if you would be happy to record some sections of your flights (ideally using OBS) then I’d love for you to upload and share them with me so that I can edit them together and make short intro sequences that will be included in the randomly selected pool of background visuals for the FsHub website.

What kind of video clips am I looking for?

• Landings/touchdowns etc.
• Rotation (take off) clips
• Wing views showing beautiful scenery and weather formations (maybe sunsets too)
• Window views (looking out)
• Transitioning through clouds
• On-approach (nearing the runway)
• Taxiing
• Pushback
• Ground services working around the aircraft/baggage loading etc.

Note: I don’t really want a ton of in-cockpit views (as us simmers see enough cockpit views whilst we’re flying anyways :)) and therefore ideally all of the above would be external views of the aircraft!!

Note: There is no limit on the types of aircraft that I’m looking for and I would ideally like a selection of all types of aircraft (to demonstrate that FsHub is inclusive of all types of aircraft)

In return (if your clips or part of your clips are used), I will ensure that a full list of credits (usernames and links to your profiles) are credited and linked to on the website. For those that go far and beyond (eg. amazing high-quality footage, great scenery, liveries etc and really have spent a ton of time/effort making great clips/panning in etc) I will also send them several “FsHub” vinyl stickers (to anywhere in the world) – I recently got a load done on Stickermule!

I’m hoping to make about 10 videos (all being under a minute long) and will be cutting between various phases of the flight from startup, taxiing, take off, mid-flight to the landing.

I think it could be a fun little “community project” and I hope many of you can get involved and help contribute video clips for this project!

Hopefully, all video clips can be submitted to me BEFORE this coming Thursday (October 28th 2021)!

You can use this page to upload your video files (screen recordings) – please upload as many video files as you want! Just pay attention to the 1GB file upload limit (per file) and I would therefore recommend that you record multiple files and then upload them separately – don’t worry as I will edit them all together anyway 🙂

If you have any questions about this or want to run an idea past me then please join our Discord server and ask in there, you could also post a message somewhere in the forums or, alternatively use the built-in Contact Us page (if you don’t have or prefer not to create a Discord or forum account) and I will get back to you as soon as possible!

Happy recording and I look forward to seeing all of the wonderful video clips you guys upload and editing them together into some great video sequences for the FsHub homepage!

It seems like an age since my last update post but things have been happening behind the scenes and testing of the new client (that has been released today) have been in the process for several months now! – I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our “Test Pilots” on our Discord server as well as Cody (clorix) and Uwe (thunfischbaum) for the many test flights they have personally performed too!

LRM Client v4.3.1 has been released!

I’m super excited and pleased to announce that LRM Client v4.3.1 has today, been released and can be downloaded from the LRM Client website.

The new release comes with a ton of new features and improvements over the older LRM Client 4.0.0 release.

You can read about the new features on the LRM Client website or you can see below for a quick summary:

• Improved support for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.
• G-Forces now captured at landing and it contributes towards the landing rate “score” (G-Force recording not currently compatible with XP11 though).
• New “Route Planner” feature added – You can enter route plans manually, import from a virtual airline saved route plan or from a SimBrief or LittleNavMap plan file.
• Virtual airlines can now style the LRM client interface remotely (for virtual airline flights) – This can be done throught the Virtual Airline Management screen using the “Logos” tab.
• Extra sound effects/cabin announcements (bad landings, pushback, arrival).
• Ability to disable all sounds effects/cabin announcements for light aircraft (< 3 tonnes OEW).
• Ability to “ignore” touch and go landings from automatically reporting as a flight in FsHub (can be enabled from the Preferences Window).
• New in-client issue/bug reporting feature (with debug logs).
• Updater system to automatically migrate your LRM client settings on LRM client version updates.
• New in-client links to our new support forums and Discord server.
• Performance and stability improvements.

Update:- Please be aware that a handful of the 200+ users that have already downloaded and installed this version have reported issues following upgrading (they are unable to launch the LRM) – whilst this is only happening for a handful of users, if this happens to you too you should uninstall the new version whilst we work out what is causing this and re-install the previous version (v4.0.0) you can download the older version here.

You can download the latest version of LRM Client from the LRM Client website at: https://lrmclient.org

The new “Countries Visited” page/feature

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had requests from some users to add a page that includes all the flags/countries of the world and to highlight which counties a user has already visited (landed at) as well as the outstanding countries that he or she has left to explore.

Whilst I felt this was a great feature it had been put to the bottom of the list for a while and other more important updates have taken priority but I’m pleased to announce that as of yesterday this feature is now available for all users and can be accessed from their dashboard screen by clicking on this button:

or from any user’s public profile page (by clicking on the “Countries visited” link above the flags like so:

Once you open the page, you will notice that countries that you (or the pilot’s profile that you are viewing) have visited will show the countries’ flag in full colour and the country name in bold – countries that you have yet to visit will be greyed out.

Ok, the feature isn’t a new “next level” or “groundbreaking advancement” but I think that many will enjoy this feature and will give them some ideas as to where they may wish to fly to next in order to add some more flags to their profile.

Loving the updates?

If you appreciate the updates and new features and are able to comfortably help the project by donating, please consider doing so, you can find out how to donate here.

I would like to officially announce that thunfischbaum of whom is a very regular user of FsHub has, as of yesterday officially joined the FsHub support team!

thunfischbaum has already been helping a ton of users over at our Discord server and also in the community forums.

I’m super pleased to have him join our support team working alongside myself and clorix!

Welcome to the team Uwe (thunfischbaum) – it’s great to have you!

In other news… it’s been nearly a month since my last post and it’s been a super busy month for me, I’ve had less time this month but the EFB is nearing completion.

The latest BETA release of LRM client has continued to be beta tested by our “test pilots” over at Discord and the feedback has been great, if I’m not able to complete the EFB by the end of the month then I’ll look to officially release the latest version of the LRM client without the EFB so that those users of whom would like to play around with the newer features can!

Hello all, I hope you are well and enjoying the summer months!

I wanted to take the time to update you today on the new changes and features that have been released recently as well as what I’m working on next and what you can expect in the next couple of weeks…

The overview of improvements made recently are as follow (but detailed descriptions are included further down this in this blog post):

1. New logbook filter and sort features
2. GPS Tracker improvements
3. New global stats and leader board feature
4. Pilot menu updates
5. Your “flight map” now appears on your public profile page too and so, you can now show off to your friends all of the amazing destinations you have visited!
6. Webhooks now outputs a GeoJSON flight path (allowing webhook users to generate and create flight maps on their own websites etc)

New features

With regards to new features on the FsHub website and since my last post, you may have noticed some improvements to the GPS tracker, these being:

* The checkbox options for enabling/disabling “auto-centre” and “range rings” are now persistent (these states now are now saved to your personal settings) and will restore your previously used state when you next open the GPS tracker.

* The GPS tracker will now reposition your aircraft elegantly when you start the sim (previously this would “jump” your aircraft from your last known location to your new (simulator) location causing a direct line to appear on the GPS map).

In addition to the GPS tracker improvements, there is now a “global stats” and “leaderboard” page that can be accessed from the homepage of FsHub. You can access this page using the link titled “Want more stats?” but alternatively (and whilst you’re reading this blog post) you can use this direct link. The new leaderboard/global stats page shows many interesting statistics such as current users (by name) online, recent flights, top pilots by distance, flight hours and a total of flights this month as well as the top-ranked virtual airlines. In addition to these stats, the page also shows the top ten flights by aircraft type and the busiest airports by departure and arrival too!

As I continue to improve FsHub based on the user feedback gathered earlier this year, one of the main requested features was the ability to be able to filter and sort your pilot logbook and whilst up until now, I’ve been prioritising many other features and improvements (as well as the recent setup of our forums and discord server), I am pleased to announce that as of yesterday a new logbook filter feature has now been released and can be used.

You may also notice some small updates to the pilots’ menu too (top right-hand side of the browser screen) to help make it easier to access and filter your logbook entries without having to go via. your public profile page.

If you would like to try out the new logbook filter features, I have prepared some screenshots below that to explain how to access and use the feature (it should, however, be pretty self-explanatory):

Although there have probably been many other smaller and backend-specific improvements to FsHub over the last month that I have developed, released and subsequently then forgotten about, the aforementioned features and improvements are the most notable and user-facing 🙂

What’s next?

The major features that I will be working on next are centered around a new release of the LRM client (detailed below) but in addition, I will also be adding the following features to FsHub website too:

1. Personal stats tab on your pilot profile (eg. stats about your flights by aircraft type, most flown routes, top landings by FPM and many more)
2. Clicking on an aircraft on the radar to automatically shown the previous path it has already flown (instead of just where it is currently)

If you’ve been watching the forums or you are a member of our discord server, you will have noticed that I have been releasing several new beta releases of the next FsHub client (this is effectively to test “rolling” changes for the upcoming major new release of the LRM client).

Clorix (our Head of Support) has also organised a new team of volunteer “test pilots” on our Discrod Server to help test and feedback on the new and upcoming LRM Client (v4.3.0) which I shall be heavily concentrating on over the next couple of weeks, the features that have already been implemented into the latest “development” version are as follows:

1. G-forces now recorded at landing.
2. Ability to add a flight plan through the client (optional)
3. Ability to import a flight plan through the client using a SimBreif XML plan file (optional).
4. Ability to import a flight plan through the client using a LittleNavMap file (optional).
5. Ability to import a flight plan through one of your virtual airlines company routes (optional).
6. Selecting a VA route to import will now display a pop-up windows and containing any route notes that your VA owner has added to the specific choosen company route (if applicable) – This is a nice way to give information to your pilots before flying the route!
7. More (optional) sound effects (eg. pushback safety message, arrival message, screaming on “bad” landings).
8. Ability to automatically disable cabin sounds for light aircraft.
9. All known bugs and issues resolved.

Other new features (that I have yet to complete) but will be worked on and completed in the next couple of weeks prior to the next and final BETA release of LRM v4.3.0 and finally being publically released as “stable, are as planned:

1. When selecting a virtual airline as your “duty airline” the client will “transform” it’s visual style to use your virtual airline’s icon and colour scheme (if an icon and colour scheme has been setup by your VA owner).
2. The long awaited **EFB** – The majority of this is actually already completed but there is still have a few things I need to finalise. As a reminder, this feature will allow you to connect your tablet, phone or other computers to your main simulator and will be able to get your aircraft’s LIVE (instant) GPS position (unlike the web-based GPS which updates only once every so many seocnds) updates as well as access your charts that you have been uploading and been “collecting” in your FsHub “charts bag”. The moving map will also allow you to see taxiways and runway numbers too (making for easy navigation at airports). It will have an integrated notebook, chart browser, METAR and airport lookup facility too!
3. Ability to “set” your aircraft’s ICAO designation (if it cannot be automatically matched) – Previously you could only do this AFTER you landed by editing the flight report!
4. Ability to “set” a custom sound pack for your aircraft (eg. if you have an EasyJet sound pack, you can specify (and assign) it to use that specific sound pack for that aircraft/livery through an easy to use window in the client.
5. Ability to switch which sound pack you want to use via. the client (if you haven’t already specified and “set” one for the current aircarft.

That’s it guys – that’s all the news and updates I have for you this month and I hope that my next post (due out at the end of July or early August) will be full of great news and hopefully the BETA testing of LRM 4.3.0 will be well underway by that time and a public release date for LRM 4.3.0 should be set!

If you are keen to keep up on the latest news (which is less formal than the format of these blog posts) please be sure to join our new discord server and forums too – there is already a handful of very friendly and regular users that are happy to help with any questions you may have on Discord 🙂 – We also find it super fun to share and show off our in-sim screenshots too 😀

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and as normal, if you would like to contact us with feedback, questions or suggestions you can contact us via. our forums, discord server or via. private message.