It's the little things that stump me.

[DaytonaLynn]

This seems such a simple task a caveman can do it.
But I have trouble getting
1. Rwy lights on
2.changing intensity.

I try slow clicks, fast clicks and it just seems to take minutes to get this simple task accomplished. Other than going to the airport and playing with it, anyone have any suggestions.

I don't fly nights much, but as the daylight is getting shorter, it won't be long before we/I do evening flights. This will be my second year as PPL and last fall/winter/spring, I didn't do but three or four night flying. Had to contact FBO for help with lights.

Thanks for the help/suggestions.

 

[Bill Watson]

You might find that if you are practicing your clicks on the ground that the problem may be that you are on the ground. The other night a bunch of pilots were complaining about the fact that the owner of their airport set the PCL at 6 clicks(!). He apparently didn't like people exercising his lights unless they really needed it and I guess knew the secret code. We started playing with our handhelds and found that we couldn't trigger it. Then someone pointed out that it only works if you are in the air or perhaps near the airport office.

Mea Culpa; my first truly stupid pilot trick was inviting my girlfriend up for a night flight before I had my PP certificate. I did it at night so no one would see me in the club C150(!!). It was a beautiful night but it was the first time I actually had to trigger the PCL at this otherwise busy NJ airport. Five slow, slower, and even slower didn't work. I started to slowly panic as I tried to figure out where the heck the strip was and whether I could land with out runway lights.

Fortunately someone else did 5 clicks and I was able to land. It never occurred to me that the 5 clicks actually needed to be quicker than my 5 slow ones. Stooopid a la mode

 

[denverpilot]

Many of the receivers for lighting control are purposefully somewhat deaf. There's another 20 airports around on the same CTAF frequency that also have PCL and the radio techs get tired of hearing the municipal government officials whine about the cost of the electricity.

Kinda joking, kinda not. There's no reason to design a great receiver for PCL. There's probably also more than a few that haven't been tested with a service monitor for a long time, unless that's an FAA maintenance requirement that I'm unaware of. I don't see many FAA trucks rolling out to check on such things when there's real reports of broken ones. Priorities. There's probably a mandatory maintenance schedule but it's probably measured in years.

If you suspect one is malfunctioning, the squeaky wheel probably gets the grease. Report it.

I've found slow deliberate clicks with good pauses in between while airborne usually work best. For bonus points, find the ground-based antenna and go stand next to it with a handheld and it'll work fine. Then you can practice how fast or slow to go.

Many of the systems have significant lag in their responses due to the need to throw physical switches with motors. You're switching a significant amount of current when you count up all those runway lights and their current draw.

If you stand near the control box you'll hear significant clunking and clacking after the controller that's connected to the radio receiver sends the switching signal to the electronics in the downstream switch box. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk. Lights change. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk. Lights change.

 

[douglas393]

This may sound real stupid, but make sure you are on the correct frequency. Had a couple of friend who have experienced not being able to turn on the lights after the tower had closed and one was on Unicom and not CTAF, the other had misentered the frequency. The places I have flown at night require clicks to be down in a deliberate fashion. I have never timed it but it seems to be about slightly less than two clicks a second.

There was one occasion when I first started doing regular night flights where I could not turn the lights on at the airport I was going to land at. Checked the Notams when I got back(as I stupidly did not before I took off for that 20 minute flight), and found the lights were OTS.

 

[gismo]

Something else that many pilots don't realize is that since aircraft radios use AM, if you're talking loudly or the mic is picking up strong low frequency sounds while you're clicking away it can cause the receiver to ignore the signal.

 

[DesertNomad]

This may sound real stupid, but make sure you are on the correct frequency.

Had that happen on my night XC with my CFI... turned them on and landed and then reactivated them but ended up on the ground a bit longer and as we were doing the take off roll, the lights went out just at rotation... and we had already set the radio to call Center. Yikes - it got real, real dark!

 

[gprellwitz]

Remember one time going into an airport with PCL and clicking the lights multiple times. All to no avail. When we got back to the home airport we found that, while the airport in question had PCL, it WASN'T on the CTAF. In fact, it required a PHONE CALL prior to landing.

 

[denverpilot]

Something else that many pilots don't realize is that since aircraft radios use AM, if you're talking loudly or the mic is picking up strong low frequency sounds while you're clicking away it can cause the receiver to ignore the signal.

Nope. No Carrier Operated Relay circuit in common use cares what the carrier is modulated with.

If you can name an airport where you can repeat this consistently I'll put $20 on the receiver being off-frequency by enough margin to cause a properly modulated signal to be outside the receiver's passband.

If you can consistently reproduce it only from one aircraft at that or multiple airports, the transmitter is either off frequency or over-modulating and splattering outside the allocated bandwidth.

Or it's an old 25 KHz channel-spacing radio, being received by a 12.5 KHz or worse a European standard (Or badly mis-programmed commercial receiver capable of changing from wide to narrow band via software switching of receiver front-end fliters) 8.33 KHz channel-spacing receiver.

Another possibility is simply that the squelch circuit is set too "loose" for a new local noise source. The receiver squelch doesn't close when you unkey, which means the COS circuit doesn't toggle state and "count" one or more mic clicks.

Easier to fix than explain. Five minutes with the speaker volume turned up on the receiver and watching the pulse indicator light, at the receiver, would show 80% of common problems.

In FM 2-way analog the industry added "sub-audible" (in quotes because I can hear them above about 100 Hz no problem) tones to the carrier to more proactively know the received signal was a real transmission and not noise. COR pulses and keying are considered the absolute lowest reliability form of remote signaling in any noisy environment.

But then again, add an oscillator and a trained morse code operator and that radio message will get through when virtually nothing else can, barring say the last decades developments in ultra low speed automated data comm synced to a network clock source like WSJT. ;-) It's on par or better in spotty band conditions at the receiver noise floor with Morse via CW, and removed the need for a trained operator altogether.

A simple WSJT contact of contact, reply with callsign, received signal report and return callsign, and sign off can take 30 minutes.

Probably too long to turn the lights down, eh?