About This File
RSBN (Radiosistema Blizhney Navigatsii) was the soviet TACAN analogue. It had approximately the same features,
namely:
* VOR-like operation (fly a radial to or from the beacon, intercept radial)
* Automatic flying of arcs at a specified distance ("Orbita" mode)
* Automatic flight in the vicinity of a beacon (SRP mode), to a specified point on a track parallel to a certain radial
* Notification when reaching a point on a radial at a specified distance
* ILS functionality ("Katet" mode) if the beacon had additional equipment coupled to it at the airfield
* "Meeting" mode where two airplanes could find each other in "peer-to-peer" radio comm
* "Ident" mode whereby pressing a button in the cockpit would "blip" the airplane on the radar screen (a small ATC
station could be driven from the RSBN station on-site)
RSBN beacons were also mobile (often mounted on trucks) and easy to deploy in the field. To this day the Russian
military use RSBN for different operations, and many military RSBN stations are enabled from time to time to provide
for seasonal operations on the most important airfields.
Unlike VORs, beacons were always oriented to true north.
A beacon is tuned using the "channel" just as TACAN. Channels have two digits - 0 to 4 and 0 to 9, this makes
44 channels available at any given time. RSBN station handling ILS-like operations could service less airplanes
at the same time, so soviet airfields would often operate a spare RSBN unit to provide glideslope and localizer.
This functionality is not implemented in the plugin though.
Read the README file supplied with the plugin on how to build generic instruments that provide RSBN to the pilot (the plugin operates based on a few datarefs). Note that the Windows version has not been tested by me but is reported to work.