We haven't changed anything about how VRPs are selected for inclusion in the position report. If you're unhappy with it, it might be worth starting another thread as this one is very much focussed on town inclusion.

Tim,

I've tried the new maps as well and I'm happy like psuter with the town names, but noticed another inadequacy.

When flying near bigger airports the position report sometimes shows messages like '6 km W W VRP', which means I'm 6 km west of visual reference point W(iskey). As there are 5 airports around my homefield all of them having VRPs, I'll now have to evaluate which airport the VRP belongs to before I can report my position to ATC.

Eric

Hi Tim
Just got my maps update yesterday and went on a flight from Switzerland to Germany and back and i was totally happy with the town names displayed on the chart. All my previous examples i found in Switzerland are now resolved and the correct, relevant towns are displayed. thanks alot for this update.

One idea / feature request: i have Urban areas enabled and sometimes i would like to know the name of a town but it is not displayed by name only the urban area is shown on the screen. For example "Meilen" at the east coast of the lake of Zurich is a well known town, but it is never displayed on the map. as a matter of fact, none of the towns on the east coast are displayed by name.
I can imagine two solutions to help in that case:
1.) after a long press on the urban area, display in the "what is here" menu the name / waypoint for that area.
2.) when i zoom out on a map, some town names disappear as there is not enough space to show them all. however, when i zoom in, there is a point where no additional town names are displayed anymore. maybe this functionality could be extended, so that smaller towns are displayed the further i zoom in. basically a similar approach like on google maps. this would be the most intuitive i think.

Thank you, Tim, we'll see if and what the changes will improve and report back.

Eric

I've already explained the actions we have taken for the time being in regard to this issue.

I had a look around my general flying area, examining towns that show up on the 750k scale. My favorite one was "Vranov nad Dyji" in Slovakia with a total recorded population of 888 souls as per Jan 2014. Many towns shown have well below 5000 inhabitants. You'd be sneered at if you used one of these for a position report.

So, please, fix this so that this feature only refers to aeronautical features and resorts to towns only when absolutely nothing else is available (hard to imagine anywhere in the civilized parts of Europe).

-- Chris.

I've made a slight change to favour aeronautical features over non-aeronautical features in the next version, we'll see what the effect of that is. We exclude small strips, microlight airfields etc from position reporting because ATC is often unaware of them, so in a lot of cases, towns will still end up being used.

In the UK we have CHIRP - Confidential Human factors Incident Reporting Programme. In the latest edition of their newsletter I happened to note this article (no mention made of any particular navigation product):

"We havepublished reports on several occasions about RTF transmissions that fell shortof the high

standardsthat we all expect. We received another example from a pilot who overheard anexchange in

which therewas fault on both sides. A controller was working hard and allowed hisfrustration to show

when apilot gave his position with reference to a small village of no aviationsignificance. The controller

was wrongto be sarcastic but the pilot was wrong to refer to a place that the controllerand other pilots on

thefrequency were unlikely to know. A rough estimate of range and bearing from abig town, airfield or

beacon isbetter than an accurate position relative to an insignificant village; if usingan electronic tablet

App checkto see if reference features are configurable. Poor RTF wastes time, fails inits purpose of

communicatingclearly and causes distractions. We all need to think how our message will bereceived

before wepress the transmit button."
Tony

If there are no aeronautical features within a radius of, say, 20 nm then use a large town. But you need to ensure that the town really IS large. As it is now, there are plenty aeronautical features around within that radius and SD still references a tiny little village. This situation has occurred to me in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia.

Greetings, -- Chris.

There are not always any aeronautical features around.