DCS Comms
Trainer
A course, a guide, an exercise and a prompter for fighter controller communications in DCS World, taken verbatim from the ACC manual. Twelve lessons for a complete beginner, sixty-eight entries with an index and a search, fifty multiple-choice exercises and a glossary of eighty-eight terms. Plus the Picture, which watches the mission feed and says what you would call right now.
What it is
Comms is where you learn to talk like a fighter controller, and where, during the mission, you look to know what you would call right now. Four things on the same page: a course for a complete beginner, a guide to consult, a multiple-choice exercise, and a prompter hooked to the feed.
It lives inside SECTOR, the application that also hosts Mission Tracker, Live View, GCI Scope, ACIS, ATC, JTAC and Briefing Builder, and is reached from gcidemo.
Where the calls come from
From the ACC manual (ATP 3-52.4, with its Navy and Air Force twins MCRP 3-20F.10, NTTP 6-02.9 and AFTTP 3-2.8), the October 2024 edition, in the public domain.
The calls are reproduced verbatim. That is the choice that matters: a phraseology rewritten in someone’s own words teaches you to be understood by the person who rewrote it, and a squadron needs exactly the opposite, namely that two people who have never flown together understand each other on the first pass.
The manual is the controller’s, towards the fighters, which is why the trainer sits beside the GCI and the ACIS. The tower is one extra section, standard, to be aligned with the group’s procedures.
The course, before the guide
The Course tab is the first one to open, and that is not a layout detail. Whoever arrives knowing nothing, faced with an alphabetical list of acronyms, closes the page.
Twelve lessons in order: who talks to whom, the transmission, bullseye and BRAA, declarations, the group, the PICTURE, the check-in, the intercept, emergencies, the threat from the ground, the tower, how to practise. Each lesson carries its own terms and links into the guide and the exercise, and the lessons already read stay marked for as long as the page is open.
Beside it, a glossary of 88 terms, each with its source.
The guide and the exercise
The guide is seven sections and 68 entries, with an index and a search. The exercise is 50 questions, multiple choice, with one right answer and three near ones: getting it wrong among four distant options teaches nothing, because the answer is found by elimination.
The Picture: what to say right now
The part that is not a manual. The Picture keeps the groups between one round and the next, by the identity of their members, and produces the events the way the manual names them:
| Event | When |
|---|---|
| ADDITIONAL, POP-UP, THREAT GROUP | on appearance, depending on where and how |
| THREAT | at 35 NM from a friendly, in BRAA |
| MERGED | at 3 NM |
| FADED | after thirty seconds of silence |
| TAC RANGE | at 60 NM |
| NEW PICTURE | when the shape of the picture changes |
The first round records and stays silent. Without that rule, on opening the page would announce everything already airborne as new, which is the fastest way to make people stop looking at it.
The same engine lives in a single module used by three pages: in the GCI as a COMMS block with the track call and the PICTURE key, in the ACIS on the VAB Picture key, in the ATC as “What to say” in the aircraft panel. Two copies of the same state machine diverge the moment one of them is fixed.
Access
Open at gcidemo.alessandrosimonitto.it/comms, with the demo notice on first entry. It is a section in the roles like the others.