RealSimGear feedback / sim setup

[Marc_B]

Curious if any of you have put together a flight simulator with RealSimGear equipment and your experience and set up.  I have X-plane 11 on my old laptop and a honeycomb alpha yoke.  But have tossed around with the idea of putting together a little better setup for some emergency and instrument scenarios.  The biggest limitations to ease of use with my current set up is the screen (hard to put everything in to easy see what you need to without panning a lot), and the avionics interface where I'm not "plugged in" to the cockpit the same way you are typically.  Seems like a large curved monitor and a set up like RealSimGear bundle would go a long way towards that but wondering if it's worth the investment, what equipment is optimal, and how well it replicates your workflow IRL.

equipment list/pics/details would be helpful!

Marc.

[tankertoad]

I use Air Manager (Sim Innovations) to build my panel and run it on separate screens. You can upload instruments and build a panel that is the same as the panel in your plane. It interfaces with XPlane, so I use XPlane for the airplane model (haven't found a good Mooney model, so I use the Columbia 400 in XPlane) and all the simulation in the background. The Instrument panel hardware (Realsimgear, Flightsimbuilder, propwashsimulation, etc) use plug-ins to interface with Xplane also. My setup is a little complex, utilizing two PCs (a gaming PC for the top screens running Xplane, and a mini-PC for Sim Innovations.  Absent from this pic is a gear switch I added later. The The two PCs and Foreflight network through the Wifi, plus I'm linked to the internet for real-time weather, although my biggest enemy is Microsoft forced updates either kicking my plug-ins offline due to version compatibilities, or blue-screening my flight sim altogether (happens about once a year), so I'm considering just loading a stable version and keeping it on a closed network after I saw how FlightSafety manages their BTDs.